My Life So Far (2 page)

Authors: Jane Fonda

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BOOK: My Life So Far

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All this washed over me on my fifty-ninth birthday, in 1996. It was now or never. Fish or cut bait. In a year I would be sixty. One friend of mine said she slept through her sixtieth; another said he “went into hiding.” Now, don’t get me wrong. I hate getting old—it’s a vanity and joints thing. But I knew that I would have to do what I usually do when I’m scared of something: sidle up to it, get to know it, and make it my friend. I have made the truism “Know thine enemy” work for me many times over the years. For instance, when I was in my forties, knowing that I was approaching menopause and the inevitable changes that would bring, I spent two years researching and writing a book with my friend Mignon McCarthy, called
Women Coming of Age,
about how women can prepare for menopause and the aging process. When the changes did begin (much later than I had anticipated), I was prepared. I knew what was negotiable and what wasn’t.

With all this in mind, I decided to fully embrace my upcoming sixtieth birthday by exploring what my life had been about up until then. Doing this changed me in ways I would never have foreseen. Coming to see my various individual struggles within a broader societal context enabled me to understand that much of my journey was a universal one for women—played out in different ways and with different outcomes, perhaps, but with common core experiences. This is what liberated me to write this book.

I also realized that it was time to talk about my personal experiences during the last five years of the Vietnam War. I want to do this partly to set the record straight but mostly because of what my experiences during those years taught me—about myself, about courage, about redemption. The most important of these lessons came from U.S. servicemen, from whom I learned that although we may enter the heart of darkness, if we are brave enough to face and then speak our truth, we can change and be set free.

Much has been said (not always in a friendly way) about the many variations of my life and how they have played themselves out in public; about the varied personas I seem to have taken on, the new faces that seemed to come with each new man in my life. I understand—now—what that was all about, and I explore it in this book. I hope that other women might see something of their own experiences in what I have to say about how a girl can lose touch with herself, her body, and have to struggle—hard—to get herself, her voice, back. Also, I believe that change can be a good thing,
if
you are fully
in
each phase and
if
the changes represent growth. For better or worse, I have been fully invested in each phase of my life, and I’m glad, because it enabled me to learn and grow. I hope this book will infuse the saying “Life is the journey, not the destination” with flesh and blood, because I believe that it is more joyful to embrace and be in the journey than to assume you’ll ever “arrive.”

My life has been marked not only by change but by discontinuity. Bucking social, familial, and professional expectations, I never focused on a pot at the end of my rainbow, and I now think this
lack
of early focus is one of the things that saved me. Had I, out of fear or laziness or “normalcy,” done a freeze-frame on my earlier self, the self that wanted approval, well, I can tell you with certainty that I’d be sleeping through this third act . . . probably with the help of pills.

I feel that the very changing nature of my life helps to make my story relevant to other people and also to this modern era. Everything about our world today speaks to the need for flexibility and improvisation, yet young people still feel pressure to do life the way their parents did: deciding early on what they want to be when they grow up and committing to it. They feel there must be something wrong with them when it doesn’t work out that way. We’re brought up waiting for closure (when I graduate, when I get married, when I know what I want to do and become a grown-up), and we expect contentment to follow. Youthful dreams then give way to “reality” and we succumb to what
is
rather than striving for
what if.
Consistency can be a trap, especially if it leads to being consistently wrong rather than to stopping, admitting your mistake, and changing course.

One thing is for sure—the genie of “continual flux” is out of the bottle. Tectonic shifts in our global socio-psycho-economic realities have made constant change the norm—consistently! I believe in the words of the Sufi poet Rumi: “The alchemy of a changing life is the only truth.” Certainly, my own life is proof that flux is often creative, enlivening.

I have structured this book into three acts. The first act I call “Gathering,” because it was in those first thirty years of my life that I took in all that had made me
me—
the tools, the experiences, and the scars that I would spend the next two acts recovering from, and also building upon. The first act is also when I gathered resilience.

The second act I call “Seeking,” because that is when I turned my eyes outward and began a search in the world, for meaning beyond the narrow confines of myself and my immediate life, asking, What am I here for? What are other people’s lives like? Can I make it better?

The final act is called “Beginning,” because—well, that’s what it feels like.

While the high visibility of my public life has not always brought personal peace and happiness, it has lent a certain universal quality to my various metamorphoses. In the course of my writing, I have realized that perhaps I can use this to advantage: I can peel back the surface layers of events with which you, the reader, already have an association and invite you to see them through a new lens, with new eyes.

I moved “out of myself”—my body—early on and have spent much of my life searching to come home . . . to be embodied. I didn’t understand this until I was in my sixties and had started writing this book. I have come to believe that perhaps my purpose in life is to show you—through my own journey—how and why this “disembodiment” happens, especially to women, and how, by moving back inside ourselves, we can restore balance—not just within ourselves but on the planet. I discovered that being disembodied rendered me incapable of intimacy, and so halfway through my second act, I went on a search for that.

I have dedicated this book to my mother. For me, this is a big deal—a way for me to begin to restore my own balance. You see, I have spent most of my life feeling and acting like an Immaculate Conception in reverse: born of a man, without aid of woman. For reasons you will come to understand, I have spent far too much energy obliterating all in my life that represented my mother. This has taken a profound toll. Dedicating this book to her marks another turning point in my attempt to live a full, conscious life.

So here’s to you, dear reader. And here’s to you, Frances Ford Seymour, my mother—you did the best you could. You gave me life; you gave me wounds; you also gave me part of what I needed to grow stronger at the broken places.