Today we’d like to introduce you to Meredith Walters
Meredith, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
When I was a kid, I knew exactly what I wanted to do—wander the woods looking for animals and magic and write stories about everything I found. I loved it so much I wrote my first novel when I was twelve.
As I grew up, however, I gave up on these things. It started when I entered my novel into my school’s book contest and got the second-to-lowest score possible. It continued when I got wrapped up in achieving what I thought I was supposed to and concluded that my childhood pursuits were weird, immature, and unimportant.
After high school, I stopped writing. Eventually, I began to struggle with anxiety and depression. After college, I tried out eleven different roles in eleven years. I didn’t know what I wanted or what I was good at.
I was lost.
Fortunately, the anxiety and depression forced me to look for a better way. After trying lots of things, I finally found a few that helped, and with the support of some wise and wonderful of people, I realized how disconnected I’d become—from myself, other people, and the wider, living world.
Slowly, as I reconnected with my own feelings and body, I also came back to who I am at the deepest level and began to reclaim the things I’d loved as a child—nature, imagination, and stories.
At some point it dawned on me that I was far from the only person who had lost my way in life, and that what I’d learned could help others too.
I got certified as a coach to be able to share what I’d learned the hard way and began to help others travel that now-familiar path of remembering who they are and what they have to give the world.
And I kept writing. My second novel, This Animal Body, was published last year, a mere thirty-three years after I completed my first.
As I began to help others reconnect with themselves and what they loved, I realized that the things I had abandoned—my quirky stories, my sensitivity, and even my depression—were invaluable gifts.
My misunderstanding had been thinking I needed to grow out of these things, when in reality, I just needed to grow into them.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Is anybody’s road smooth? I doubt it. But I think it’s the bumps in our roads that give us some of the most powerful gifts we have and can give to others.
My biggest challenges have come from struggling with anxiety and depression. These are different for everyone in terms of their causes, lived experiences, and impacts. For me, both have to do with loss.
I strongly believe depression is not a flaw or defect, but rather is akin to the pain I feel when I put my hand on a hot stove. It directs my attention on the area that most needs it and makes me willing to let go of whatever I happen to be holding onto.
In my personal experience, depression arrives when I lose connection to myself, other people, or the wider, living world. I have a habit of being in my head all the time, ignoring my feelings and body and the core of who I am. When I’m cut off from myself, I disconnect from others and put what I think I should be doing ahead of what comes to me naturally—a spiritual connection to the natural world, creative writing, and spending time with animals. Depression forces me to stop—I literally can’t keep going—until I feel the pain of what I’ve lost and acknowledge it. Only then can I begin to find it again.
Similarly, anxiety for me has been about wrestling with that great and difficult truth—that we will all lose everything we love.
How do I come to terms with that and not lose myself in fear?
I found that the answer (again, for me) is to find what cannot be lost. We all must figure out what this is for ourselves. For me, it’s my true nature—the expansive love that I am beneath all my thoughts, feelings, habits, and personality. It’s also my connection with all other living beings, which I experience most powerfully in the natural world.
In being with the nature around me, I find the eternal, unbreakable nature within me.
I don’t think I would have discovered any of this without the help of anxiety and depression. They’ve been both my greatest challenges and my most powerful teachers.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I’m an author and a career/life coach. What ties my work together is that it’s all aimed at helping people discover the magic of reconnecting with their wonderful, wild selves and the wider, living world.
In coaching, this often means helping folks who are unhappy at work discover greater joy and satisfaction by finding their calling and fulfilling their purpose—in practical ways that acknowledge their desires and their need for an income.
Involving nature, creativity, and play as much as possible, I help clients reconnect with their truest, deepest selves and find their path by learning how to tap into their forgotten intuition and rediscovering their power, passion, and purpose. They’re then able to design their work and lives around what’s most essential to them.
In writing, I share stories of unlikely discoveries and unexpected joy in the natural world in my Substack publication, Real-World Magic (https://meredithwalters.substack.com).
My favorite story to date, however, is my novel, This Animal Body, in which a neuroscience grad student is determined to discover a cure for her depression but instead must find out the truth about a mysterious group of talking animals with ties to her forgotten past (https://meredithwalters.com/books/).
Is there something surprising that you feel even people who know you might not know about?
I’m very practical, realistic, and down-to-earth, so people might be surprised to know that I believe in magic.
Not wizards and dragons and supernatural spells, though I like to read stories about those, but rather real-world magic—the kind we pass by all the time but don’t recognize because we are either moving too quickly or are too distracted, or have convinced ourselves it doesn’t exist.
I learned to see real-world magic when anxiety and depression forced me to find hope in a life that at the time felt utterly hopeless. Once I learned to recognize it, I began to see it everywhere.
It’s in the people, places, and things that surprise us by making us feel better than we ever thought we could.
In the experiences that make us believe, at least in fleeting moments, that anything is possible.
In the strange powers that help us be in the right place at the right time; know what we couldn’t otherwise possibly know; and love the people and things around us long after it stops making any sense.
Most of all, magic lives in the unique and powerful gifts each of us carries that happen to be exactly what the world needs.
I have no doubt that this real-world magic is equally as transformative as the sorcery and supernatural abilities of my favorite literary fantasies. I write about it in my Substack publication—Real-World Magic: Unlikely Discoveries and Unexpected Joy in the Natural World (https://meredithwalters.substack.com) and would love to share it with you there.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://meredithwalters.com/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/meredith.walters.author
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/meredith-walters-decatur
- Other: https://meredithwalters.substack.com/
Image Credits
Bonnie Heath
Dan Tennery-Spalding
Helton Felix da Silva
