christine gacharná | live, love, relive®

One of the greatest, most difficult things I’ve ever done — a time when I felt like I was truly doing the impossible — was to drive, all by myself, across town, to the airport. Without an iPhone.

:crickets:

So yeah. Let me back up a bit, because clearly you’re not feeling my pain.

See, I went to high school and learned how to drive in this little town in Oregon, maybe you’ve heard of it? There are no traffic lights, no cloverleafs, no bridges or overpasses or tunnels, so none of this exit-right-to-turn-left stuff that I still often have a hard time wrapping my brain around. For as much as I travel, I’m a bit directionally challenged.

I wasn’t always all of the things that you see standing here in front of you. 

In fact, thirty years and five days ago, May 17, 1988, I sat exactly where you are sitting, in this exact building, at this exact luncheon.

Here’s what I looked like back then: 

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I think my son was about 10 when he saw my high school senior photo for the first time. He asked, “What, did you stand over an air vent or something?”

Then he asked, “Your mom let you go to school like that?”

What can I say? It was the ’80s. 

I wasn’t a big deal in high school. 

I wasn’t the kind of girl who made Homecoming court or prom queen or cheer. Although I lettered in volleyball and basketball, I wasn’t the team caption and sometimes I sat the bench. I’m allergic to animals, so 4-H and FFA were out of the question. I won a few elections here and there for class secretary, and I did go to Oregon Girls’ State, but that was mostly because I was excited to travel to Eugene. There was no asterisk by my name in the graduation program for National Honor Society, I wasn’t valedictorian, and I didn’t win any of the teacher-nominated awards. I certainly wasn’t an Eri Cup finalist, so I’m way out of my element here.

One of highlights of my sophomore year was when I wrote a story about my volleyball team to submit to he local newspaper, and it got published! But they removed my byline, so nobody even noticed that I was now a published writer.

What I wanted to learn was watercolor painting, photography and creative writing. But it was high school, so I found my home instead in English, yearbook, and typing. My friends handled the math and science for me: Bill Barry cut up my frog and Jacque DeFord did my algebra and geometry homework, and in exchange, I wrote and edited a lot of essays and provided summaries of novels (this was pre-Spark Notes, you realize? We didn’t even have email yet. We were all still typing on our electric typewriters.) 

In junior high, I used to walk around Lakeview selling pepperoni sticks to raise money to travel on the bus to San Francisco. In high school, those sales took us to New York and Washington D.C. Somewhere in there, I traveled to Puerto Vallarta and Honolulu. 

This was the motto my senior class chose. I nominated it, and I fought hard to convince my classmates to adopt it. I believed in that quote.

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

I got the Daly Fund and accepted into college but I had no idea what I wanted to BE let alone what I should major in. 

Trying to figure it out, I made a list of three things I wanted to DO: 

1. Travel
2. Speak Spanish
3. Learn, really learn, how to use my camera on manual mode.

Armed with my list, I registered for Photography 101 the fall of my freshman year. I took pictures of my friends and people I loved.

It was a disaster. They were properly exposed (which was half the battle back in the days of learning with film) but that’s about the only visually interesting thing that can be said about them. My instructor berated me in the critiques of most of my assignments and gave me a C for a final grade. He told me to go back to the English department and major in literature.

Not even six months into my college journey, I failed to heed my own best advice. I hung my head, defeated, and accepted that I wasn’t very good at photography.

The summer after my freshman year, I went to Scandinavia and I spent a month of my 19^th year and all my savings tooling around Stockholm, Oslo, Copenhagen, and Helsinki with my camera. The sun almost never went down, and they had this thing called the Northern Lights. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to leave.

My parents reminded me that my college scholarship didn’t work overseas, so I returned to Oregon and by then the rain was really wearing on me. I dreamed of moving to Arizona.  

My last semester of college as an undergraduate, I took only Spanish.  I wanted a Bachelor of Arts, not a Bachelor of Science, and to earn that, I had to pass second year college language with at least a B. By the time I took my final exam, I was consistently dreaming in Spanish and I decided that was good enough — I checked off No. 2 on my list. I got the grade, got my degree, packed up my car and drove to Arizona.

I found a job as a newspaper reporter. My editor would yell at me, swear at me, throw things at me, and push me waaaaaay out of my comfort zone. He’d hang notes on my desk to remind me how to be a better writer. 

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I got my first death threat from a reader and he assured me that only good writers get those. (Yes, there were trolls even before there was the internet.)

I won a first place award from the Arizona Press Club. I got accepted into graduate school at the University of Arizona and while I was there, I worked my way up the food chain to become editor in chief of the campus newspaper.

My graduate thesis was to put my college newspaper online.

At the time, the internet had just gone graphic — meaning, we had the internet, albeit dial-up (don’t ask) but we only had text. This possibility of publishing images AND text online was revolutionary. I was so excited. Because of my job as editor-in-chief, I had a million dollar advertising budget to work with and 100 student employees under me — I had the resources and the knowledge to build an online newspaper. And I had my advisor’s support.

Only then my advisor got cancer and had to go to the Mayo Clinic. I landed in front of the department head, who had taken over my advisor’s academic duties, to explain my thesis. I was positively bursting with ideas and possibility, telling him all about learning to write HTML, the graphical interface, interactive reader polls, contributions in the comments, journalism forever changed.

He leaned back and then said to me, deadpan: “Christine, the internet is a fad. Find a topic and write a paper.”

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

I wrote the paper. It’s titled, “Refrigerator Journalism” (get it? You know, the kind of newspaper articles that Moms cut with scissors and hang on the fridge?), an exploration of community journalism in small towns and how such newspapers affect the local residents and economy. It was illustrated by clippings of me in a homemade costume in Kindergarten all the way through my sports team photos in high school —  I even included my first article, the one where my byline was missing. That made me feel better.

“Refrigerator Journalism” was never published in academic circles — in fact, I’m certain only one person ever even read it: my Mom.

This time, I didn’t yield.  

The online Arizona Daily Wildcat was one of the first of its kind, and it still gets recognition for that. Only one person read my essay, but millions of people were reading my newspaper and readers from all over the country were sending us comments, participating in our polls, engaging in what we were writing.

My efforts caught the eye of an editor at a large city newspaper and he recruited me and offered me a job before graduation. It was settled then: Arizona was my place, and I would never leave. I was a the top of my game. I shipped all my sweaters and closed-toe shoes to my sister in Oregon. 

Only, I had met a boy.

The week before our wedding, he graduated from Undergraduate Pilot Training and got his first flying assignment.

In Tokyo.

Don’t wait for the perfect moment; take the moment and make it perfect.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg frequently tells young women, “The most important career choice you’ll make is who you marry.”

They didn’t have Facebook yet when I got married, so I didn’t know this.

So now I’m living in Tokyo, heel marks all the way from Tucson, trying really hard to make the moment perfect but not doing a very good job of it, when one of my college friends from Oregon came to visit me. I had to pick her up at the airport, which was only 20 miles away, but it took an hour and twenty minutes in hairy, beastly traffic to crawl those 20 miles.

In one of the largest cities in the world. 

In a country where I didn’t speak the language and couldn’t read any of the road signs.

Oh — and they drive on the LEFT in Tokyo! 

And I didn’t have a cell phone.

And I learned how to drive in a small town in Oregon.

Whenever I used my turn signal, the windshield wipers came on, because everything in Japanese cars in Japan is backward from how it is in the U.S.

Another American had written directions for me to follow. It said things like “turn left on the Chūō, drive until you see the sign that says “shake and three fries” 立川, turn right, go until you see the large pink cat on the tile building, be careful to stay in the left lane in the tunnel because it splits without warning …”

I picked up my friend, and she says to me, “I can’t believe you’re DRIVING!” 

Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.

My husband and I lived in a Japanese house with rice paper walls and tatami mat floors. We spent our nights in Roppongi and our ¥ (Japanese yen) in the Ginza. I rode the trains and the subway back and forth to work. There were people outside the train called “Crammers,” their actual job was to shove as many people into the trains as possible before the doors closed. Inside the train, there were people called “Gropers.” I never really knew who they were, everyone was inside my personal space. 

We traveled to Hong Kong and Singapore and then back to Hong Kong again because it was Just. So. Cool.

I was working for a Japanese company that manufactures electron microscopes. They hired me to “write their English correspondence” — great! Right up my ally. Only I’d get to work and they’d hand me pages and pages of technical specs to type and retype. Subscripts, superscripts, Greek characters … I hated that job, and one day, I stood up, walked over to my supervisor, and announced, “I quit.” The whole place got silent. Apparently, you don’t do that in Japan. In Japan, you take a job and you work there for 40 or 50 years until you retire. Stupid American that I was, I didn’t learn about that until afterwards.

I asked a Japanese friend to write the words for me in Kanji, and I ran an advertisement in a local newspaper that a native English speaking American was now accepting new Japanese students who wish to learn English. I charged $100/hour and paid off all my student loans.

By the time we returned to the States from Tokyo, I was 6 months pregnant and had a one-year-old. I had gone back to work as a freelance writer for newspapers, but once our second child arrived, it was too hard for me to keep a complete sentence in my head, let alone commit it to paper. 

Had my daughter gone to Lakeview High School, she would’ve been in your graduating class; she’s exactly your age. 

You don’t remember that day, but you’ve all heard about 9-11. That day changed everything. My husband’s best friend from college was flying a KC-10 training mission in New Jersey that day. A KC-10 is a tanker, they refuel fighter jets in the air so that the fighters don’t have to land. So there he is, just another day at the office, teaching student pilots how to fly a tanker and safely orchestrate an in-air refuel, when he gets orders from the Pentagon to divert to Manhattan and lead the first refueling mission over the World Trade Center attacks. 

With student pilots.

And suddenly, our country is at war.

My husband was flying C-17s. He was gone 300+ days out of every year for the next four years. Most of the time, I didn’t know where he was. I tried not to watch the news and I was glued to the news. I did the best I could to hold everything together at home.

My career was still on hold, and I felt like my relevancy in journalism was slowly floating away, but I had two little people who needed me more. Besides, I’d stumbled into a bead shop and discovered sterling silver wire. One day, one of my pilot-wife friends came over; she said she needed a birthday gift and she wondered if I would sell her one of those bracelets I’d been making.

Don’t wait for the perfect moment; take the moment and make it perfect.

The jewelry business was therapeutic for me during that time; it gave me something to focus on other than the search for Osama bin Laden, it was compatible around my life with two-under-two, and it was a creative outlet that didn’t require a lot of brain energy.

At some point, I needed images of my jewelry. I tried and tried to photograph it myself, but I just couldn’t get it right. I found a professional photographer in Gig Harbor who did product shots for Nordstrom. He charged way more than I could afford but I hired him anyway. 

I watched carefully as he worked, studying the things he was doing and the tools he was using, most of which I didn’t understand. I listened carefully to him as he explained the highly reflective properties of metal and crystal and I was astonished at how simple his end setup was, a piece of glass over sawhorses with the jewelry lit from behind. No wonder I wasn’t getting it right!

My jewelry business was relatively successful and it lasted until the one holiday season as I was opening cards from friends, noticing that several of them were sporting photos of their kids that I’d taken! 

It was time for me to get serious about No. 3 on my list of things to do with my life — learn, really learn, how to use my camera on manual.

I studied the inverse square law and memorized the four factors that constitute the quality of an image and I took the national exam to earn a CPP after my name: Certified Professional Photographer.

And I passed.

The best I can describe the feeling is a deep sense of accomplishment for my 19-year-old self.

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To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

I want to talk for a moment about “taking the moment and making it perfect” because it’s a really nice thing to print on a graduation program, but I don’t have the first clue as to how to help you go out into the world and find perfect. What does “perfect” even look like?

There are only two certainties that I can guarantee each and every one of you as you embark on adult life: death and taxes.

In between, you’ll discover the moments that make up your story, the story of Your Future Self.

I can tell you this: I didn’t travel all the way to Lakeview to stand before you and talk about my “perfect” life. 

I opted instead to tell you of moments well lived. 

I came all the way from D.C. to describe the moment a high school boy saved me from the horror of cutting open a once living thing now drowning in formaldehyde.

Or the pleasure of seeing my byline in print for the first time.

Or the frustration of my master’s thesis proposal rejection.

Or the delight in telling a captive audience that the internet, as it turns out, isn’t a fad. 🙂

Life isn’t perfect.

People aren’t perfect.

Things don’t always go perfectly as planned.

My flight yesterday was delayed, and I didn’t get to my hotel in Reno until 1 a.m. I had to be up at 6 a.m. In order to make the four-hour drive to be here on time. It wasn’t perfect, but it was absolutely worth the experience of being here so that I may challenge you to question the way you see perfect, because perfect is just an adjective.

Adjectives describe nouns.  

Perfect. 

Perfect what? 

See? Without nouns, adjectives have no meaning.

So my challenge to you is to dig a little deeper and identify the nouns that will become the subjects of Your Future Self’s stories. 

The verbs that go with those nouns, the predicates to your subjects, will color, define, and shape your experiences. The nouns are yours to choose, but it’s verbs that follow those nouns that will define your character.

Dig a little deeper as you consider your post-high-school plans. Identify the nouns you wish to incorporate into your life (for example travel, photography, study.)

And then own the experience with verbs that illustrate your actions (for example serve, create, pivot, learn.)

At some point between death and taxes, life will kick you hard and without warning into the shoes of your Future Self. And you’ll just have to roll with it because your classmates are depending on you. 

Or your clients are depending on you. 

Or your boss is depending on you.

Or a newborn is depending on you. 

Or your commanding officer is depending on you.

Or our nation is depending on you.

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Ok. So to wrap things up here:

High School You is over and Your Future Self hasn’t arrived yet. 

I call it You, v. 2.0 to represent the in-between space you’re going to feel for a little while — years, hopefully — because graduation is going to separate the High School You from Your Future Self and you’re going to feel the unsettling in-between of You, v. 2.0 for a little while. 

I know this because I was once your age.

Now I live with people your age.

The thing about that in-between time, about this new version of You, is that you have the power to create it.

How do you do that?

By heeding your own mottos. 

It’s not possible to take the moment and make it perfect without first making a conscious choice to strive do so.

It’s not possible to start doing anything, let alone doing what’s necessary, without making a conscious choice to do something.

Want something? Make the conscious choice to do one thing each day that takes you in that direction.

Don’t like the direction this is going? Make the conscious choice to turn a different way.

OR, you can do nothing — but don’t be fooled: doing nothing is making a conscious choice. 

“Don’t let life kick you into the adult you don’t want to become.” —Chris Hadfield, Canadian astronaut.

As difficult as You v. 2.0 can feel, she has the exhilarating power to directly influence and shape all future versions of yourself and for the first time in your life, YOU are 100 percent in control of those choices. Not your parents, not your teachers. YOU.

Great freedom.

Great responsibility.

You create Your Future Self — the adult version of you — by making conscious choices to usher in the subjects to your predicates.

Every day. 

You, v. 2.0 makes the conscious choice to do what’s necessary, do what’s possible, do the impossible, to find the opportunity in any given moment, to strive, seek, find, and not to yield … You v.2.0 is the version of yourself that will live into Your Future Self of your own design.

I’m happy to introduce you to the second version of yourself, the woman who is the most decidedly, uniquely, and excitedly you, the woman who has successfully shed her High School You and is now making the conscious choices that will produce Her Future Self.

She is your best version of you to date. Love her, cherish her, honor her, and care for her, as Your Future Self’s health, happiness, and success depend on her. 

I want to thank the ladies of Soroptimist for inviting me here today. 

I realized something interesting as I prepared to be here today: that I could go around the room and identify ways in which each one of you ladies touched my life as I was growing up in Lakeview. I’m probably going to have to pay for this brag, but I’m going to brag a bit about one of your members who was instrumental in helping me find my way — 

my Mom. 

She birthed me, cared for me, taught me manners, showed me the trick to carrying a tray of drinks without sloshing or spilling, made sure I was educated, rescued me when I got into trouble, and she’s given me everything she can to make my life better. That’s what Moms do.

Thank you, and congratulations, ladies. 🙂

Christine Verges Gacharná grew up in small towns, first in Southwestern Colorado and then Southern Oregon. After four years (sheesh, ok, maybe five) of college in the Oregon rain, she fled to Arizona, where she intended to stay forever — only then she met a young, sexy Air Force officer. The week before their wedding, she pinned on his pilot wings and he whisked her off to Tokyo, Seattle, D.C, New Orleans, back to D.C., and a few Flyover Places in between. She’s a freelance writer, editor, photographer, and instructor.

She is a 1988 graduate of Lakeview Senior High School and credits Dr. William Barry, her classmate whose Future Self became a veterinarian, for fulfilling her most daunting high school biology requirement.