RTDM: Arrington McCoy
Arrington McCoy
Mental Health Counselor, Workshop Facilitator, Yoga Instructor
Cambridge, MA
We want to get to know you! Briefly tell us about yourself: Where you came from, where you've been and how you're living your dream?
I've moved (if not to a new country or state, at least to a new apartment) 17 out of the last 18 years. This lifestyle of packing light and being open to new opportunities, new people, and new places has made everywhere and nowhere feel like home all at once. My roots are in North Carolina, but I've left pieces of my heart in California, Ohio, Wyoming, India, Switzerland, Massachusetts, and various other places I've called home for lesser amounts of time. I worked after college as an educator in a variety of contexts: a working farm, the remote Wyoming Rockies, an experiential semester school in the North Carolina mountains, and a traditional boarding school in the Swiss Alps. After years of teaching, I realized that my best work was happening with my students outside of the classroom--conversations in the hallway about the things that were most pressing in their lives. And so, I decided to pursue a degree in Mental Health Counseling in order to focus my vocation on helping people answer their most pressing questions and to live with the questions that they can't answer. I couple my work as a counselor with facilitating a monthly Women's Circle in Cambridge, MA and teaching private yoga classes, as well as leading semi annual retreats. The course of my life, and the course of my work, have led me to believe that we are both human beings and human becomings. The paths to exploring personal unfolding are many, and I'm delighted to be able to offer a few.
How do you define success?
I think all of the truest wisdom in the world is best captured by our poets. David Whyte is one of my favorites, and in his poem titled, "All the true vows" he writes: "There is only one life you can call your own and a thousand others you can call by any name you want." Success is shedding all the other lives that other people imagine you leading, or that other people want you to lead...it's shedding the belief that your life must conform to a certain idea in order for it to be right or good. Success is claiming the "one life you can call your own" and living it--living all of it, which of course will include both devastating lows and unimaginable highs.
What did it take to make your dream happen and when did you know you had arrived?
I began facilitating a Women's Circle in Brevard, North Carolina four years ago. I knew that particular circle would get off the ground because I had a community of long standing, dear friends, in the area. When I moved to Massachusetts two years ago I didn't have any friends in the area, but I decided to start a Women's Circle anyways. And it took off immediately. It was incredibly gratifying to know that the concept was strong enough on it's own to take hold, even without the glue of prior connection. I so strongly believe in the need for people to have an opportunity for genuine connection--with themselves, with others, and with the world around them. This basic belief has helped propel my work forward. I've tried to do jobs that I didn't believe in, and that kind of work left me miserable and drained. It's not that I'm never tired now, or that I never have days at work where I'd rather be home, but I don't ever question the purpose behind what I'm doing now, and that is an incredible gift in my life.
What are you most proud of? Go ahead, boast a little!
My currency of success has always been the thank you letters I've gotten from people. I've gotten letters from some of the people I've worked with that would be the first inanimate thing I'd save if my house were burning. Life can be quite hard, even if you have the most charmed of circumstances, and especially if you don't. It's incredibly gratifying to be able to ease the challenge some of the time.
What was your biggest obstacle/fear and what was your turning point?
My biggest challenge was re-imagining my life, when life as I knew it came apart at the seams. Personal re-imaging was followed by vocational re-imagining. Living in and emerging from my own personal darkness makes it possible for me to sit with other people while they are in their darkness.
What’s the best advice you’d give to a younger you?
You'll never have it all figured out. Getting comfortable with the uncertainty will be the biggest challenge that you'll have to face again and again and again. Having it all figured out can't be a pre-condition for action. You'll have to make sense of some hard things in hindsight, and some things might never make sense, but you'll have to carry on anyways. Life will surprise you with beautiful things you'd never imagined and sadness you could have never predicted. It's important to have good company for all of it--and that includes, perhaps most importantly--liking yourself.
How do you stay motivated and purposeful when you feel overwhelmed?
I don't have a hard time staying motivated. I'm a bit too much of an internal task-master. So my bigger work is actually to cultivate a capacity to be bored and to do nothing. Being present for other people doesn't happen when you're just tuned in to your personal "to-do" list. I think being purposeful and motivated all the time is over-rated and bad for us. My best way of avoiding this trap is to spend time, un-plugged, outside, remembering in a very tangible way that the world keeps spinning even if I stop racing around for a moment.
Tell us a time when a perceived failure was actually a blessing in disguise or served you in a surprising way.
All of the failures in my personal life serve me professionally by helping me to tap into empathy and understanding in a more genuine way. Pema Chödrön, a wise Buddhist nun, writes "Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.”
What is your favorite vice/guilty pleasure/strange habit? Come on now, we all have them!
Ice cream. Always. In all weather conditions.
What the smartest investment you’ve made for yourself?
A bookshelf full of poetry anthologies.
What’s MOST important to you right now?
My dog's happiness. She is love incarnate.
Share 1-2 books you've given as gifts:
The Book of Qualities by Ruth Gendler and River Flow by David Whyte
What have you learned to say no to?
This is a hard question for me, because I'm bad at saying no. I have a lot of fear around closing doors, because I've seen what a gift it can be to say yes to opportunities--even ones that scare you. I really like organizational psychologist, Adam Grant's, work around generosity in the workplace. He coined the terms: takers, matchers, and givers to talk about people's orientation towards giving in the workplace. I am getting better at identifying when I'm involved with a "taker," and setting up boundaries around that relationship. My friends would probably say, I'm still really terrible at this, but baby steps, you know?
What's something most people would never guess about you?
I had one of those lives that from the outside looked very together until I was 28 and I ended my engagement, and my world unraveled in a profound way. As heartbreaking and excruciating as that time was (and sometimes still is), it's a relief in some ways to not be a person who "has it all together." Nobody, even the people with the most impeccable facade, ever really do have it all together, but not living that farce has been freeing and has deepened the relationships I do have in my life in ways I never could have predicted.
Follow Arrington:
www.human-becomings.com
