Life Equity by Marsha Blackburn

Author:Marsha Blackburn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2010-09-09T00:00:00+00:00

Life Equity Profile #6

SUSAN LEVINE

The Bridge to an Authentic Life

For Susan Levine, the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan represented more than just the most direct route into the city from her home in Jamaica, Queens. It stood as both a literal and figurative connection to another way of life. A more authentic life. One in which the “real” Susan could finally emerge and flourish.

Ironically, it took a death to jolt her to life.

It was the early 1970s, and Susan was thirty-three years old with two children and what outwardly seemed the perfect life. “It wasn’t that I was living a lie,” Susan mused, “but the life I was living was the one I was expected to live.” She worked in her father’s printing and mailing business—just as expected. She had married the man everyone thought she should marry, though the marriage later ended in divorce. She dressed the way women in her position and setting were supposed to dress. Again, just as expected.

Two events would ultimately serve to challenge that stifling conformity. The first was the death of her mother in 1993—a woman with whom Susan had a close but complex and difficult relationship.

“When my mother died, I suddenly felt free to make some drastic changes,” Susan said. “I decided I was going to write my own story. I wasn’t sure what it all meant, but I just knew that in the same way my mother had cut the umbilical cord when I was born, I cut an umbilical cord when she died.”

The other event was in 1974, shortly after her daughter was born, when a friend who was very successful in the travel business approached her. He pulled Susan aside and asked her a startling question, point-blank: “What are you going to do with the rest of your life?”

Susan responded with a mixture of surprise and bewilderment. She had never really thought about it. After all, she seemed fulfilled.

“Well, I’ve watched you,” he continued. “I’ve seen how great you are with people. You have something special, and I believe you could become an extraordinary travel agent. If you want to add something to your life, all you have to do is drive into Manhattan to talk to me. Here’s my card.”

“It’s odd,” Susan confided. “I was a thirty-something woman, but as I drove across the bridge for that meeting, I felt like an independent grown-up for the first time in my life.”

That meeting launched a successful career that would ultimately lead to owning a travel agency. More importantly, it represented the first step toward the realization that there was a capable, competent, dynamic woman beneath the layers of personas she had developed in three-plus decades of being what others expected her to be.

Thirty-three years later, with an ever-expanding portfolio of devoted clients, Susan attributed her longevity in the industry to three primary things: her ability as a listener, complete honesty, and the fact that “being a woman allows me to use my brain and my heart simultaneously.” The fact that

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