1. An Awareness of The More.
All journeys of Living Your Truth start with the sudden suspicion.
The suspicion that something is missing.
Your life may have all kinds of alleged indications of success – grades, degrees, awards, marriage, mortgage, kids, job, business – but you just aren’t feeling it anymore.
The awards for another year of good behavior is just dry to you. Monochrome. Flavorless.
And you just stop being able to fake it anymore.
So to get you back in the program, “they” start telling you that:
“you should be happy”
“it must be nice to (insert thing you should feel guilty for not appreciating)”
“this is just how it is, no one is really happy”
“you just need to grow up”
“you just need to settle down”
“being happy is just not realistic. this is the real world, not fantasyland.”
“life is about compromise, you need to get used to it”
These mantras twist in your head, infecting your soul, until you finally turn to melancholy. Depression.
Or worse, the unfeeling nothing of having given up the hope.
Until the day when an unbalance enters your world.
It may be a book you devour all night, so altered by the ideas contained therein you can’t put it down to sleep. A piece of music that makes you shiver. A word from a loved one that makes you cry. Meeting someone who has a fundamentally different kind of life & worldview, who shows you what might be possible.
You may be forced into it when some “success” of your life implodes. You loose a job, your marriage disintegrates, your business fails, the house is taken away by floodwaters, someone is struck ill or dies unexpectedly. And your entire perspective is violated. Blasted apart overnight.
However it happens, a tiny brilliant spark enters the blankness in you mind.
An awareness of The More.
2. You Allow The Moment.
Once awareness of The More infects your soul, the inevitable progression begins.
You recognize the mediocrities of the shoulds.
The ordinaries that once were unnoticeable fixtures in your daily life become boring. Annoying. Intolerable.
You question every decision you have ever made. College. Career. Certifications.
The blog you abandoned when it was judged controversial. The event you were too chicken to produce. The poem you never published because poetry’s not practical.
The house. The stuff. The basement full of clothes you’ll fit into someday and things you might use eventually and pieces of projects you thought someone like you should do.
The people you loved who left when you didn’t fight for them. The people who keep staying even as they complain every moment. The people who won’t leave but look right past you when you walk into the room.
You devour the stories of the possibles.
Books, blogs, twitter streams filled with people who have chosen another life. Who quit the job even though they had a mortgage. Who are living the life they consciously designed – without a trust fund, without being discovered, without launching to wild acclaim at SXSW.
People who got their book published. Who launched their charity. Who sold everything they owned to spend a year biking across the United States.
You ask yourself the questions of the why nots.
That person is not as smart / worldly / young / experienced / educated / tall / cute / well-connected / extroverted / weird as I am, and they still did it.
I could sell my car. I could start a blog. I could take a few weeks off. I could move for a year. I could write. I could draw. I could speak. I could start.
You imagine the potentials of the whats and the hows and the whys.
What you would do if you won the lottery or if you had to start over or if you were going to die in 5 years or if you knew you could not fail.
How your perfect ordinary day would be scripted – the loved ones you would be with, the art you would create, the beauty you would see, the people you would help.
Why are you on this earth. What is the meaning to your life. What are you really supposed to be doing / finding / creating. Where is your contribution. Why is this important. What will you leave behind.
But it’s all just thinking. Just fantasizing. Just wishing.
It’s all just bullshit.
Until you allow The Moment.
Now, The Moment is not the day you quit your job or sell the car/house or leave the abuser or pay off the debt or start the company or set off for your 100 day trek through the remote villages of Indonesia.
The Moment is not plot. The Moment isn’t a thing you do. The Moment is not visible to another being in our corporal existence.
The Moment is the decision.
Where now and forever you declare to yourself and Whomever is listening:
Yes. I must have the More.
No. I must abandon the Shoulds.
You declare … fuck it, I’m doing it anyway.
Even though you are scared to death.
Even though everyone will think you are crazy.
Even though you might loose everything.
Even though it goes against all the rules you have ever known, everything you’ve been programmed to believe, all the artifices of accomplishment you have ever worked for.
Because staying in mediocrity is a pain too exquisite to bear any longer.
Staying is agony. Staying is draining your blood from every pore. Bleeding you slowly, from a thousand cuts.
Because staying in mediocrity for even one more second means the eventual death of your soul.
Because now, you suspect. Because now, you hope.
Because now, you know the first edges of the Something you must do.
Because now, you know you’re going do it.
–
Postscript:
Then this sickening tingle trickles down your skin, from your scalp down to your toenails.
Your stomach turns itself inside out. Your mouth waters, nauseous.
And you say to yourself and Whomever is (hopefully) still listening:
Oh. Shit.
–
3. The Terrible Secrets of the Uncomfortables.
You had The Moment.
And now that horrid, sickening feeling is coursing through your body.
Your mind, your gut, your very cells, the genes passed down to you from your caveperson ancestors who needed them to flee saber-toothed tigers and various impending dooms are all screaming at you:
STOP! IMMINENT DANGER! YOU WILL MAKE YOURSELF DEAD IF YOU JUMP OFF THIS CLIFF!
Worse, they’re shooting hormones through you, sabotaging your great leaps of spirit and faith, by dragging you back down into basic human-animal survival mode.
Into acting practically. Into acting rationally.
Into the deadening morass of the management of risk.
Unless.
Unless you make the choice that makes your ego, the bitch in the corner, the resistance monster, and the caveperson in you all cringe in fear and disbelief, wanting to gang up on you to kidnap your soul and stick you with pins until you give into their mediocratic bidding.
Unless you make the completely unreasonable choice.
Unless you choose to live every day in the Uncomfortables.
Yes, you read that right. Live. Every. Day.
Because that is the first terrible secret.
This panic? This fear?
This sense that you need to run or fight or throw up or hide under a warm thick blanket so the unknowns can’t drag you away?
That feeling doesn’t go away.
As long as you are living your truth, as long as you keep pushing your boundaries, as long as you are moving forward and expanding your soul, you will feel scared and uncertain and uncomfortable every single day.
Yes. Every. Day.
But before you run away to wail and beat your chests, deriding the futileness of it all, let me share the second terrible secret with you.
The Uncomfortables are actually a gift.
The Uncomfortables are a tool to help you live with the ramifications of the Moment, to manage the challenges of Living Your Truth.
The trick is to recharacterize the Uncomfortables from a feeling to be avoided – to a feeling to be appreciated. To be cherished.
Reprogramming your brain to use the Uncomfortables as a signpost, customized for your mind, your body, your soul.
A thermometer to measure whether you’re doing something mediocre or magnificent, whether you’re staying in safety or pushing your boundaries, whether you’re stuck in the shoulds or living your truth.
The third terrible secret is that the Uncomfortables always mean something very particular.
Is this Uncomfortable a scary-yet-exciting, a sickening-yet-expansive message from your ego who wants to keep you small and safe? Does it mean, yes, this scary action is exactly what will move you forward on the path to embracing and living your truth?
Then thank your ego for the fear & take the scary action anyway.
Or, is this Uncomfortable a gross, disempowering, deflating message from your soul who wants you to fulfill your purpose on this earth? Telling you that this scary action is a guilt-ridden should that would take you backward into mediocrity, and must be avoided at any cost?
Then thank your soul for the fear & say no to the should.
The fourth terrible secret of the Uncomfortables is only you will know the difference.
Only you will know if the Uncomfortable means hell yes or hell no.
Sorry about that.
I'm Elizabeth Potts Weinstein, a writer, teacher, and coach.