Beverley Glazer: 0:03

Have you ever wondered how the stories we tell ourselves can really change our thinking? Welcome to Aging with Purpose and Passion. I'm Beverly Glazer and, if you're new to my world, I provide tools for women to overcome challenges and connect the missing links in both their personal and professional lives, and you can find me on reinventimpossiblecom. I want you to meet Diane Wysga. Diane is a fearless voice of resilience. She was a US Navy nurse, a lawyer, an educator, a storyteller, helping socially conscious professionals and organizations to deliver their authentic story and connect and engage with their audience. Hi, diane, welcome .

Diane Wysga: 0:57

Thank you, Bev. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

Beverley Glazer: 1:00

It's always great to talk to you. I want to start with something that is pretty personal, but I think it's very important because we all come from somewhere and it is what makes us and you are, so resilient, and your resilience stems from being a survivor of incest. Can you tell us a little bit about that time?

Diane Wysga: 1:46

That was a later in life, I would say, oh, probably into my early 30s, before a perceptive therapist asked some questions, questions, and we uncovered what I knew was there but didn't know was there. And so I began to do the work around discovering what incest was and what it meant to be an incest survivor. And what I learned for myself as an incest survivor and I've done a lot of work around it, and so I've gone on to speak to other women and men as well is that what is taken away from us is our voice. Because when we try, as children, to say this has happened, that has happened, and we are denied you're a liar, you're telling stories that couldn't possibly be, then we begin to do a couple of things. We begin to doubt ourselves, we begin to doubt the intuition that serves us well in life saying danger zone, danger zone, don't do this. And we also begin to doubt our voice.

Diane Wysga: 3:15

If I can't get someone to pay attention to what's happening to me by using my voice, by using my voice, apparently my voice isn't worth anything.

Diane Wysga: 3:47

And I find that, as I look back on life, that I kept pushing through in areas where I needed to be heard, but I wasn't confident of the way in which I was speaking, and I wasn't confident that I was using my own voice, my own words, my own way. So, having done the work around, that gave me an opportunity to say who here is experiencing the same thing. Not that my life is a prescription for how someone else should live, but my life, sharing the vulnerability of it, sharing the challenges and the awarenesses of it, is a way of saying, as CS Lewis did so well what you do, I thought I was the only one. And that, right there, is the key for why we have a voice, why we share our stories, and we do it in a way that invites someone else to sit with us and say I thought I was the only one and I'm not. So we're building community story by story.

Beverley Glazer: 4:48

Beautifully said. But you didn't start as a storyteller. You started really your career as a US Army nurse. How did that come through? When did that?

Diane Wysga: 5:05

Yes, so the storytelling part is probably something that was always there in the background, because I do remember my mother saying that's a story, isn't it Like? Well, I'm just practicing for later on. The choice to go into the US Navy was in part because of my dad and his brothers. So my dad was a radio man in World War II. He served on a Navy ship and his five brothers also were serving in World War II in different branches of the military. One of them was actually on a ship that was bombed in Pearl Harbor when the Japanese invasion came in and they all came home. They all came. How they made it home, I don't know, but there was just something about the romance of that. It sounds a little bit odd, but the romance of doing something a little bit different. And I was always in love with the movie South Pacific. So to me the idea of being a Navy nurse meant that I was going to put on a really cool uniform and I was going to go to Hawaii and I was going to do plays and hang out and do really fun stuff. I still love the movie or the play. So that was the impetus for it, my nursing degree.

Diane Wysga: 6:22

Many of my colleagues went into area hospitals in Massachusetts and New York, connecticut, and I just said you know what? I want to do something different and I think that's a hallmark of me. I want to do something different so, prompted by my relatives' experience, my dad's experience and I still have my dad's Navy peacoat barely can button it because he was just a little drip of water when he went in. In fact, many of the young men who signed up to serve were underage and they got around that by putting a piece of paper in their shoe that had the number 18 written on it, and my dad did this. So when he was asked, are you over 18? He could say yes, I am.

Diane Wysga: 7:27

So I will tell you that the three years I served I did pediatric nursing the whole time, surgical peds and then medical peds were three of the most rewarding years of my life. I mean, I'm all of 21 years old and I'm in an open bed 30 bed open ward full of kids and there was a four crib nursery and there was a two bed step down unit and I had corpsmen and corpswomen older than me reporting to me, had corpsmen and corpswomen older than me reporting to me. There were LPNs who knew much more nursing than I did. So you learn. You learn fast. You learn by observing, you learn by listening, you learn by watching.

Beverley Glazer: 7:54

You learn by saying I don't know, that's huge, I don't know, that is really huge and humble too, but that's how you learn.

Diane Wysga: 8:05

That's how you learn.

Diane Wysga: 8:10

And you also learned the hard way about marriage. Oh, you've read my book? Yes, yes, I did. And this is key, I think, to not trusting yourself and your instincts and your intuition. I never should have married this person.

Diane Wysga: 8:26

He was a good person, but he wasn't a good person for me, and I could remember leading up to that time and sharing those doubts and being told well, you waited until you were older, in your 30s, to be married and you've got cold feet and once it's underway, you'll be fine. And it wasn't. It simply wasn't. And there were signs along the way. That was the other thing, but I ignored them or disregarded them and it's all back to that. What can I trust? Back to that. What can I trust? What do I know about myself? What is myself telling me? In what words is it telling me? In what actions is it telling me?

Diane Wysga: 9:26

And so when his year-long affair came to light, it had come just at a time when I had lost my position in a law firm because of a merger with a bigger firm and also my mom had died of undiagnosed lymphoma. So within the space of nine months, there was this triple whammy of losses. And talk about coming back from that. You don't do it on your own? There's no way. You do it on your own. You really do rely on the kindness of strangers, people who come into your life, and you have no idea how they got there. And yet they showed up, and they were supposed to be there.

Beverley Glazer: 10:13

And another thing also finding your voice in an abusive marriage, being a person who has survived incest. This is so difficult. But you got a law degree, you became a lawyer, you became an advocate. How did you find your voice, diane? That's so difficult.

Diane Wysga: 10:40

That's a great question, bev. I imagine that over time there were opportunities where the story that wanted to be told was more important than what I was ignoring. So when I teach story, I start at a place where I absolutely believe that my client knows the story she wants to tell. She just needs it listened out of her. She wants to tell, she just needs it listened out of her. She has the words, but she doesn't know that she has them. And so if I start from that place of belief, and I also start from the place of what I was taught as a storyteller, which is the story comes through us. There's a story that wants to be heard, because story is organic and it follows us home when it sleeps in our bed. So I would say that over time, the power of the story that wanted to be told was more important than my resistance. If I can point to a time when it really showed up and I think that was the bend in the road it was in law school. And in law school you can do one of two things If you're an overachiever, you can join a moot court or you can write for the law review.

Diane Wysga: 12:12

And because I always knew that, I was a talker because my mom used to say this house will be so quiet when you're gone, which I think she meant in a good way. But I became part of the moot court team and there you're handed with a partner a case that's going on to the appellate court and you have to argue both sides of that case with just the facts that you have to hand and the role that you play. From appellant to appellee you're shifting back and forth. That goes on through the whole of the competition and I found that I had a gift for it. I found that I had a gift for thinking on my feet, for speaking. In fact, someone said you could read the Manhattan phone book and I would be paying attention to you, and it was probably one of the first times where not only my voice was acknowledged but I was rewarded for it, and by that I mean at the very end of the competition. So you're weeded out, like basketball teams are, and you start competing on it, and then you get to two teams who go to the nationals or the champions, and that's what happened in this case.

Diane Wysga: 13:24

I was arguing with a fellow who had been a Chautauqua tent revivalist preacher, so you can imagine. You know what I was up against. But the opportunity to argue that case in front of a panel of sitting Supreme Court chief justices from five different states and then winning, I think was the time when I said, well, there's got to be something going on here. And that, I think, launched me further into law and then eventually to litigation consulting, where I was helping plaintiffs lawyers tell the story of what happened to their clients to a judge, to a jury and in the meantime or during the course of that, changing lives really and saving lives.

Diane Wysga: 14:20

I know that sounds huge, but when you have someone who's injured and taking their case to trial, it's a crapshoot. You might win, you might not. There's no way to know what's going to happen but the most important thing is that that person or that family gets a chance to tell their story and to be seen and heard and listened to, even if they don't win. That, I think, is life-saving and that is why I believe that using our voice, using the power of our voice, figuring out what our words are, is life-saving.

Beverley Glazer: 15:08

That's a really interesting perception, because anyone who's gone to trial, you think of the win. You don't think of expressing your voice. For you, what it really was was coming out of yourself, finding your voice, having people listen to your voice, and that is so empowering for all of us, particularly women. And you also did so much more, not just speaking, but doing. You were a skydiver. You fly a plane Incredible. You walked the Camino. You were a plane. You incredible. You walked the Camino. You were a scuba diver. What did that do for you? Because that's more than voice. That's finding an adventure all over the place Life, experiencing life.

Diane Wysga: 16:10

Oh, how wonderful that you said that. And thank you for observing what you did about trials, because it's true, when we go in, the idea is to win. Of course it is to win because, for all the good reasons of helping whoever was damaged and stopping the negligence, but to come away with a sense of at least I told people what had happened, is important. As to the adventure part of it, I think that there are two things going on there. I think it's nature, who I am naturally and nurture, and by that I mean to say that my mom was the one who encouraged and said okay, and I was thinking about this the other day because and I hadn't thought about it in a while but when I graduated from college and in between graduation and then showing up for the naval training school, I backpacked Europe, and this was back when we had no cell phones, no internet. You know, the best my parents could hope for was a postcard.

Diane Wysga: 17:23

The fact that they allowed me to go is, I think, maybe what it does is reminds me of what my mom used to say Now I can lead you around by the nose until you're 21, but after that you're on your own. And I had the let's Go Europe book which many college students who were tracking all over Europe had then, and I had a URL pass which allowed me to get on and off trains wherever I wanted to. I had a general idea of the direction I was headed in. I had a borrowed backpack from somebody my dad knew and I went and that has always been. That really has always been the way with me.

Diane Wysga: 18:14

Let's give this a go. I never jumped out of a perfectly good airplane before, but let's see what that feels like and it's that sense that is the adventure in me, I believe has always been there, and a recognition that we're going to die at some moment in time, so you may as well live until you're dead. And this idea of trying it when we retire, trying it later, trying it when, if there's something we want to do now if you can go for it, and this is what you probably mean by show up in both your life and your work.

Beverley Glazer: 19:06

Expand on that Just showing up, just showing up, just showing up.

Diane Wysga: 19:17

There's two things. One so yes, I did walk the Camino de Santiago and every day that experience is front and center in my life. I call it BC and AC, before Camino and after Camino. It was that transformative of an adventure for me and it almost didn't happen. I was in the plane going, we were on, getting ready to land in Madrid, and I'm looking out at Spain and I'm thinking to myself that this is the stupidest idea, and I've had lots of them. This is the stupidest idea I've ever had in my entire life. There is no way I can walk 500 miles. It ain't going to happen. I don't know what I was thinking of. I'm getting off this plane, I'm picking up my backpack and I'm turning around and I'm headed back home. That's all there is to it.

Diane Wysga: 20:08

And as I was putting my book into the carry-on backpack that I brought on the plane, there was a book of poetry that I carried along and in the pages of that book I had inserted cards and letters from really close family and friends that were to be encouraging to me as I walked. And I drew out one, and I didn't intend to do this, but I drew out a letter that had been written to me by one of the members of my StoryWorks storytelling troupe, and she starts the letter by saying well done. And I'm looking at this and thinking what does she mean? And she says in the letter I suppose you're wondering what I mean by saying well done. You haven't even begun yet. And she said what I mean is that, regardless of what happens from here on out, the fact that you showed up is well done. And that's how I ended up walking the Camino.

Diane Wysga: 21:13

And I think there is such truth in that that all we have to do is show up and put one foot in front of the other. The first step that's there. Take that, and regardless of what happens from then on out, we showed up. And I will tell you that story still seems so much to me. I will tell you that once we take that first step, we're usually inclined to take a second and a third and to keep on going. But just that sense, it's not that you finish something, it's that you have the courage to start it, whatever it is. And so, to this very day, I owe that pilgrimage to Lorraine.

Beverley Glazer: 22:03

Well, that's a beautiful and wise words of wisdom that you're telling everybody. Because my next question is what would you tell older women who feel that there's nothing left, that the best of their life is over?

Diane Wysga: 22:23

Well, you know, it's funny. I imagine that if we looked back at the end of each of our decades, oh, those were the good years, and then we go live another 10. Oh, those were the good years, and then we live another 10. How do you know that your best years are behind you? I spent five consecutive days out in the garden in honor of my mom, who was a master gardener, and I thought that was a really good way to honor Mother's Day. And I've been thinking to myself you know, there will come a time when I can't be humping a wheelbarrow full of manure around the garden Is that my best day Was being 20 or 30 or 40 or 50, my best years?

Diane Wysga: 23:12

I don't know, because I don't know what's over the horizon, and I would say that to claim that the best years of our lives are behind us is actually a claim of fear and it's a claim of ignorance, because we don't know. We don't know whose life we will change, we don't know whose life we will save, we don't know how we will transform the lives of those we serve by sharing our story with them. We have no clue. We absolutely have no clue, have no clue.

Diane Wysga: 23:58

So the only way to know if the best years of our life are truly done and over with or there might be another couple lurking over the horizon is to do it, because you don't cross the ocean by standing on the shore, you don't, and I can tell you these things that I've done, they haven't been easy and they haven't been simple and they haven't been, you know, like rolling off a log and that's it. But as I said earlier, my story, my life, is not a prescription for your story. In your life, you're the author of your own story. You're the author of your own story, you're the hero of your own life, and nothing gives me greater joy than to see a woman embrace the heroine in her own life and say what I didn't know I could do, that I didn't know I could say that, yeah. So that's what I would say, because I have to say it to myself.

Beverley Glazer: 25:04

Beautiful. Thank you, Diane. Diane Wisgat helps socially conscious professionals and organizations to deliver their authentic voice and connect and engage with their audience. Diana, please tell us, where can you find that? Where can people find you?

Diane Wysga: 25:25

The easiest place to find me is on my website. It's Quartermoon Story Arts. Me is on my website. It's Quartermoon Story Arts. You're always welcome to email me, diane, at quartermoonstoryartsnet. I have a podcast that's been on the airwaves for four years. Do check it out. It's called Stories from Women who Walk, and there are daily 60-second episodes around motivation and inspiration and all those other ations, and I've recently started a sub-stack account called Wisga on Words. So one of those three places you're sure to get a hold of me. Wonderful.

Beverley Glazer: 26:04

And all these links are in the show notes and they will be on my site too, and that's reinventimpossiblecom. So, my friends, what's next for you? Are you just going through the motions or are you prepared to level up your life? Download From Stuck to Unstoppable to elevate your life, and that also will be in the show notes below. You can connect with me that's Beverley Galzer on all social media platforms and in my positive group of women on Facebook. That's Women Over 50 Rock, and you can also schedule a quick Zoom to talk personally with me. I want to thank you all for listening. Have you enjoyed this conversation? Please join me next week. Subscribe, subscribe to these episodes and they will come into your inbox. And please drop us a review, send it to a friend and remember you only have one life, so live it with purpose and passion. Wonderful.