Let Your Life Speak
by Parker J. Palmer
Chapter II
"Now I Become Myself"
Copyright ©2000 by Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers
San Francisco, CA

young, there were very few elders willing to talk about the
darkness; most of them pretended that success was all they had
ever known. As the darkness began to descend on me in my
early twenties, I thought I had developed a unique and termi-
nal case of failure. I did not realize that I had merely embarked
on a journey toward joining the human race.

The story of my journey is no more or less important
than anyone else's. It is simply the best source of data I have
on a subject where generalizations often fail but truth may be
found in the details. I want to rehearse a few details of my trav-
els, and travails, extracting some insights about vocation as I
go. I do so partly as an offering of honesty to the young and
partly as a reminder to anyone who needs it that the nuances
of personal experience contain much guidance toward self-
hood and vocation.

My journey into darkness began in sunlit places. I grew
up in a Chicago suburb and went to Carleton College in
Minnesota, a splendid place where I found new faces to
wear -- faces more like my own than the ones I donned in high
school, but still the faces of other people. Wearing one of
them, I went from college neither to the navy nor to Madison
Avenue but to Union Theological Seminary in New York City,
as certain that the ministry was now my calling as I had been
a few years earlier about advertising and aviation.

So it came as a great shock when, at the end of my first
year, God spoke to me -- in the form of mediocre grades and
massive misery -- and informed me that under no conditions

Now I Become Myself

19

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