whether they were successful in achieving their dreams as the
honest pursuit of them that counts. The spiritual dimension in
creative effort comes from that honest pursuit.
There is, of course, evidence that women, too, are happier
when they’ve invented themselves instead of accepting with-
out question the roles they were brought up to play. Psychol-
ogist and author Sonya Friedman said, “The truth of the
matter is that the most emotionally disturbed women are
those who are married and into traditional full-time, lifetime
homemaker roles. Single women have always been happier
than married women. Always. And there isn’t a study that has
disproved that.”
Staying single has historically been the only way most
women were free to invent themselves. Nineteenth-century
poet Emily Dickinson, a reclusive woman who never married
and who surely invented herself, is supposed to have said to one
of the rare visitors to her room, “Here is freedom!”
Fortunately, the changing times have meant changes in rela-
tionships, too. Many of the women leaders I talked with have
managed to invent themselves even though married—as has
Friedman herself.
I cannot stress too much the need for self-invention. To be
authentic is literally to be your own author (the words derive
from the same Greek root), to discover your own native ener-
gies and desires, and then to find your own way of acting on
them. When you’ve done that, you are not existing simply in
order to live up to an image posited by the culture or by some
other authority or by a family tradition. When you write your
own life, then no matter what happens, you have played the
game that was natural for you to play. If, as someone said, “it
is the supervisor’s role in a modern industrial society to limit
Understanding the Basics