Don't Tell Me I Can't Do It! Read Online Free PDF Page B

the boys. I swam and climbed trees with them, determined not to be a sissy like all the other girls I knew. I became indignant when others would say things like, “You’re a girl. You’re not supposed to do that.” I defied anyone who suggested that there might be something boys could do that I couldn’t—physically or otherwise.
    I was ambitious. I was driven. I wanted all the options available to boys to be available to me as well. I wanted to achieve, and I would make it happen, with or without society’s blessing. That’s not to say that I ever questioned my gender identity or desired to be male; I definitely felt like a girl and enjoyed it. But I never experienced femininity as a limitation or constraint on my ambitions. I might be a girl, but I would be a brave girl, one who would fall down and scrape her arms but get back up and do it again like the boys did, one who would hold her own in a fight and take a licking without crying.
    Although I didn’t understand it then, I was actually training for the kind of life I would find myselfcalled to live in adulthood, when all kinds of opposition would threaten to derail my ambitions. In fact, all of the hardships of childhood—including the barbarity of the concentration camp—were probably intended for just that purpose. Being the boy-girl, outcast survivor-performer suits me very well, and it has allowed me to pass on a life lesson that would sound trite were it to come from any other lips. Here it is: There is no failure. Disappointments make the joy of accomplishments so much greater.
    Perhaps because of all the times I’ve been told I can’t have or do something, I’ve developed a guttural aversion to the very idea itself. “Don’t tell me I can’t do it!” I say, and then I go out to prove my detractors wrong— even though sometimes they’re right. When I decided to begin exploring hypnotherapy in my professional career as a psychologist, for example, I was taught that hypnosis would not work in the treatment of eating disorders. I had no reason to distrust the instructor on this point; he was the expert, after all. But I still decided to test it for myself. When I had gained sufficient competence, I tried hypnotherapy with some of my clientswho were overeaters. As it turns out, the instructor was right. It didn’t work.
    I never felt like that was a wasted effort, though. As I’ve said before, my policy is, “Trust, but always verify.” I may have failed to achieve what I set out to do, but I knew that the odds were stacked against me even before I started, and I could rest more easily with the truth of the matter just knowing that I hadn’t complacently accepted someone else’s say on the matter without looking into it for myself. I knew there would be no harm in failure here, but only the reward of having attempted something audacious. I’ve learned that there are few enduring rewards for those who blithely accept limitations and choose to entertain only those goals that seem realistic from a distance. It isn’t until we get in there and get our hands dirty that we can really understand what we can do—and more often than not, we find that we can do far more than we would have expected from ourselves. We owe it to ourselves to dream impudently big dreams and then go out and do our best to make them come true. I’m convinced that a great many people fail to enjoy thethings they want out of life, not because their desires are truly unrealistic, but because they lack the audacity to go out and achieve them.
    Late in my life, I’ve begun feeling a certain urgency to help others discover this inner potential for themselves. Nothing gives me greater joy than helping people who have settled for the status quo catch a fresh vision for how they can redefine themselves and discover a brand new purpose for getting up in the morning. Whether we have five years or fifty remaining before us is irrelevant; every day is an opportunity for us to do