Having it All: The Bounty of Perspective
- Delia Brett
- Sep 28, 2022
- 8 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
From Scarcity to Sufficiency: A Story of Remembering
Some of you may remember how I wrote back in April that I was leaving for a two-month sojourn to Greece — and how it brought to light some false interpretations or unconscious beliefs I was still holding around scarcity and my worthiness to enjoy the goodness of life without first working really hard and stressing out a lot. Ha!
Well, after floating in the azure Aegean nearly every day and climbing the breathtaking mountains of Athens, Santorini, Crete, and Kefalonia nearly every night for two months, I can’t help but reflect on how far I’ve come. I feel compelled to address what I was writing about in that post — from the other side of the coin (or shining sea, so to speak).
But bear with me, because to do that I feel like I should start at the beginning — or at least somewhere close to it.
Early Lessons in “Figuring It Out”
I came from a blue-collar family of five children. I was the fourth-born child (second-born twin) and always, without fail, #6 in the long list of names on the Brett family Christmas cards.
As you can imagine, having four children under the age of four (the fifth came eleven years later), my mother and father had to learn fast how not to sweat the small stuff — or else surrender any expectations of sanity for decades to come.
So, while my mother became very good at breaking up the day into manageable tasks, cooking and feeding in tandem, and constantly ushering us outside to play, my father — being from the hands-off school of parenting — became adept at promoting an entrepreneurial spirit in all his children with a “If you want it — go get it yourself” message that seemed to permeate everything he did.
My parents’ hands-off attitude was great fun when, at six and ten, we were paid to babysit ourselves. It was absolutely liberating when, at sixteen and eighteen, my sisters and besties didn’t think twice about buying a beat-up VW van and driving ourselves to California for spring break.
But with my father’s paycheque stretched thin between a family of seven, it became clear that his “go figure it out yourself” sentiment also meant, “If you want it, then pay for it yourself.”
Consequently, at nine, I was babysitting; at ten, I had my first paper route; and by the time my siblings were working at the mall, McDonald’s, or the sheet-metal shop, I was fourteen — auditioning for film and TV, and “figuring out” how to become a famous actor.
And figure it out I did.
At fifteen I landed my first supporting role in a film; by sixteen, another; and by seventeen, with six or seven TV shows under my belt, it appeared I was well on my way to becoming that famous actor I had always dreamed of.
The Turning Point
So what happened?
And how does this connect to the whole scarcity-to-abundance story I seemed to be promising at the beginning?
You see, when I began working deeply with the transformational principles of Women Centered Coaching and the work of Dr. Claire Zammit a couple of years ago, one of the most revelatory breakthroughs I had was realizing that those teenage years of “figuring out” how to be an actor on my own had created an unconscious belief inside me that I was a have-not — someone who doesn’t get to have money, success, support, rest, holidays, or pleasure (I could go on and on).
Those unconscious assumptions, habits, and behaviours would continue to shape my life for years to come.
So, yeah — while the stereotype of the “starving artist” seems like a clichéd relic, a message in a bottle inscribed in indelible ink upon our unconscious — I have to admit, I fell prey to it.
The Shadow Side of Success
Just as being a Hollywood celebrity has its shadow side, as it turns out, so does becoming a mini-celebrity in a small town.
As I began to miss school for film sets and make more money than a sixteen-year-old knows what to do with, my relationships with friends and family began to change. An invisible barrier began to form between me and, well, just about everyone else.
Friends seemed to expect me to pay for everything, and painfully, some of my closest friends even stopped talking to me out of jealousy.
As a consequence, my lesser-developed sixteen-year-old brain started associating having money and being successful with feeling isolated and alone.
So much so that, when at seventeen an opportunity came up to audition for the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York City, I made damn sure not only to get myself to the audition but to bring all my friends and siblings along. That way, I thought, whatever happened, at least we’d be together.
And so, with the help of a family network and multiple train tickets paid for on my dime, we headed off from small-town Langley and big-city L.A. to meet and live together in New York City.
When my friends went home after a month, I stayed on for a few more days to audition.
A few weeks later, the news came:
I was accepted. And a few months after that, I was offered a small scholarship as well.
The Penny Drops
So, I guess that was it? Once I finished high school, I was going to New York?
Well, months rolled by. Graduation came and went. Finally, with my enrolment at AMDA imminent, my dad sat me down at the kitchen table to break the New York theatre dream down into dollars and cents.
After scrawling tens, hundreds, and thousands of zeros up and down his notepad, he leaned back in his chair, looked into my eyes, and waited for the proverbial “If you want it, you have to pay for it” penny to drop — and drop it did.
Unfortunately, his pragmatic attempt at empowering me to “fend for myself” had a profoundly different effect on me that day.
As my siblings and friends made their own plans to fend for themselves in sunny California, I looked around my once full, now nearly empty childhood home that night and imagined a future struggling without a dime, alone in New York — or puttering aimlessly around Vancouver without a purpose.
My eighteen-year-old self unconsciously concluded that no matter how talented or courageous she was, there wasn’t enough money, support, or will in the universe for her.
And the real clincher? If she reached too far or dreamed too big, she’d have to pay for it — in loneliness and isolation.
So yeah, the penny not only dropped — it rolled behind my parents’ 1980s entertainment unit, through a crack in the floorboard, and resounded against the hidden scaffolds of my heart and mind for years to come.
Re-Membering the Story
Let me guess what you’re thinking... OMG, you’re so dramatic!
True. But let’s face it — I was a child actor. Drama was my thing.
Seriously though, what teenager isn’t dramatic? Becoming an adult is a high-stakes gig, and who among us escapes those formative years without making some false or disempowered meaning out of the difficult — or even the positive — things we experience?
Full disclaimer: I had to stop writing this for a while, for fear of dredging up old wounds.
While I was writing, I was also actively re-engaging and re-membering (re-embodying) my younger self. But from my more developed fifty-year-old consciousness, I was able to notice, as one dear friend put it, “all the other hidden doorways and passageways inside the experience” that were still locked shut.
Now, sitting back in my Vancouver apartment, with the buzzing cicadas of Greece long faded into the rumble of Broadway traffic, I’ve returned with a subtler perspective. Not entirely different — just deeper.
Because now I can see this isn’t only a story about transforming from scarcity thinking to sufficiency thinking — it’s about the remembrance of self, and how that remembrance opens us to infinite dimensions of gratitude.
The Ongoing Work of Growing Up
Few parents in our society would disagree that our primary job is to nurture the potentials inside our children — yet few would assert that nurturing their own desires and potentials remains equally important.
Looking back at my formative years — with two adult children of my own and a growing coaching practice where I help others activate and champion their potential — I understand that growing up is a process that never stops.
It means continually waking up to our own essential nature.
And it’s through this remembrance of ourselves, and the deeper seeds of our potential, that we discover the power and possibility to keep growing.
So I hope, dear reader, you’ll bear with me as I continue to grow up — here, now, again, with you.
Because sharing this with you, I can clearly see that despite feeling thrown off course at eighteen, I’m still that badass, trail-blazing girl who wants so much for her life.
I’m still that talented dreamer with a generous heart who wants to keep her friends and family close. I just got lost in a shame-based story about how it wasn’t safe to admit it.
Now, without that limiting belief, I’m free to notice the rich, complex weave of people, places, learning, loving, failing, falling, and growing that was — and is — always happening.
What Shifted Things for Me
Perspective.
Gratitude.
Truth.
The truth that I was never alone.
The truth that support was — and always is — encircling, enriching, and organizing around every aspect of my life.
The truth that when I wake up to my own essential nature, I’m better able to recognize what is essential and true in others.
The truth that those people and situations I believed were hurting me were never really about me, or about some flaw in the fabric of the universe. They were simply reacting to their own stories, their own wounds.
And as I make space in my narrative to include all of that, the story begins to unravel — and I can see how those wounds, and all the subsequent choices I made from them, were actually blessings that led me to greater depths and capacities within myself, within others, and within life itself.
Because without all of it — every bad and beautiful part of it — I would not be here now, opening to the deeper truth:
A wound is not the ending of something.It is the beginning of something.
It is the beginning of healing.
And when we turn back to face those deeper wounds in loving connection with ourselves, we discover that the healing balm we needed has been there all along — buried like a cleverly hidden Easter egg, or (in keeping with the earlier metaphor) like a golden coin in the brambles of our memory, just waiting for us to find it.
An Invitation
If you, too, are seeking a way to sift through the unconscious layers or stories holding you back — so you can uncover the deeper insights, confidence, and pathway to transformation you uniquely need — I encourage you to reach out and discover what transformational coaching can do for you.
Because, as my teacher Dr. Claire Zammit says:
“We can’t become ourselves by ourselves.”
Or simply put — we need each other.
If you resonate with any of what I’ve shared here, please let me know.
It’ll remind me — or us, I should say — that we’re not alone.
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