On Purpose.
On Purpose.
Even now, at the tender age of 22, I feel blessed to be able to say that I don’t work ‘for money’. I work because it brings me joy. That…
Even now, at the tender age of 22, I feel blessed to be able to say that I don’t work ‘for money’. I work because it brings me joy. That it (currently) brings a degree of financial prosperity is a nice side-effect that I do not take for granted.
Work (and by that I mean anything that requires me to look beyond or into myself for the sake of a greater good) — or, more specifically, doing it — is what enables me to learn, grow and evolve into the best possible version of myself.
Yet the most lucrative ventures sometimes have no ostensible value at all.
It is the work that I have done on myself over the last N years that has enabled me to get to this point, both mentally and physically; yet I would be doing myself a disservice if I didn’t also point out that said work was gut-wrenchingly painful at times and came with no guarantee of success.
Like many people, I have been in dark places at points in my life. And, as is common when in the depths of despair, when I was in those dark places I also couldn’t imagine my life being any different. More to the point, I couldn’t imagine myself feeling any different; when not excruciatingly painful, life was foggy, monotonous and exhausting, and my personal experience — and by extension identity — was tightly entwined with that.
At times, it felt like suffering was all I knew. And so, as we all do with the things we come to expect and understand — the perils of being an instinctively loss-averse, change-fearing human being (!) — I clung onto it. I couldn’t bear the idea of daring to dream, only to find myself (again) confronted by my deficiencies: intrinsically lacking AND disappointed to boot. It was safer and more comfortable to stay sad, to stay sick, to stay hopeless, because that meant that I didn’t have to put myself out there and risk failure.
If I’d already failed, if there was no point, then I didn’t have to — and maybe couldn’t even — try.
I was off-the-hook. It wasn’t my fault. And it certainly wasn’t my responsibility.
I was in no-man’s land: unreachable and impenetrable.
I’d done all I could — and so had everyone around me. There’s safety in numbers, in groupthink, in consensus; in some ways, we should all have been able to wash our hands of each other and rest easy.
But I was also deeply conflicted.
I couldn’t bear the idea of giving up, of having failed, of accepting myself and my life as is. Of this being it: all there was, is and would (could) be. And I was angry and defiant and stubborn and reckless with a chip on my shoulder and a point to prove.
I felt dangerous, and perhaps I wanted to be dangerous, too.
I cared so much and yet I didn’t care at all.
I had too much energy coursing through my body, too much blood pulsing through my veins.
I had too much to give and too little to lose.
I wanted to live, and I refused to be another ‘beautiful tragedy’.
And so, I rose.
[To Be Continued]