Get Lost
Sometimes to find your way you have to get lost.
It’s more than tossing aside the map. There are some things that you need to intentionally disconnect from. Things that need to end up dropped along the wandering road you find yourself on – burdens that are too heavy to take with you if you want to be able to travel far enough to find the place you belong.
Unhealthy Relationships
Yep. I’m jumping right into the hardest one. If a radical change necessary for you to move in the direction of the person you want to be, living a life that fulfills you, you yourself may undergo some radical changes. You’ll grow. Reach for more. And this will make some of the people around you very uncomfortable. Most people like predictability. That means if a co-worker is looking forward to stopping at your desk to commiserate about how much you both hate your job, and your growth causes you to suddenly want to focus on only positive things, that co-worker can feel very threatened by your sudden cheerfulness as you focus on writing your novel instead of complaining about your boss. If you’re moving in the direction your parents hoped, teaching Kindergarten at a good private school, and you suddenly quit your job and join the circus, family dinners can become uncomfortable as you’re challenged on the wisdom of your new job as a fire-eater.
This doesn’t mean you love the people around you any less. It just means that you have to detach from the myriad of well-meaning voices that are competing with your own, underdeveloped, internal sense of direction. You still have so much to learn about yourself, and you need some quiet and some distance to do that work.
Bad Habits
What we believe about our own actions is usually deeply flawed. We’re creatures of habit, you and I. Repeating decisions about what we eat, what games we play, what times we watch television, whether we practice our art or exercise or sleep in on the weekends. Some of these decisions we repeat so often we forget that we do indeed have an infinite number of other choices we could make. I could drink tea in the morning, instead of coffee. I could exercise instead of having a bowl of ice cream. I could go for a walk in the park instead of reading on the couch. I could go to fifteen different parks I’ve never been to within easy driving distance. I could do gesture studies to practice drawing instead of watching Netflix. I could start every day writing 500 words and have at least one book finished every single year. But I don’t make those decisions.
I often work on habits by changing small things around me, little by little. It’s a pretty effective way to do it. But the catch is that I rarely see the changes that need to be made unless I find some way to disrupt those patterns to begin with. You might not accept that your extreme ice cream habit is bad until you have a cardiac event and receive a somber warning from the doctor. That’s a disruption that rapidly gives you a new perspective. But most people don’t realize they can intentionally cause those disruptions – step away from the path and get far enough away to look back and see it clearly.
You may not have the willpower to make a major life change, but you can find the willpower to do something a little dramatic that helps you see what’s possible. It doesn’t have to be expensive or difficult. For me, in my mid-thirties, seeking out successful creative people and really listening to stories about how they felt about themselves and how much effort they put into their craft caused me to wander away from my established self-defeating thoughts. The unhealthy narrative of my life was that these people had something I just didn’t have. Some gift of purpose or talent that I lacked. I was forced to acknowledge that they simply had put in the work, and if I ever wanted to know what was in me, I had to do the same work.
Preconceived Ideas
How you see the world is very tied to your relationships and the map you’ve been given, but at some point you’ve also developed your own ideas about what is and is not true about the world. You assume that the life of a fire-eater means you’ll be traveling on a circus train and sleeping in a tent with a monkey, but we’re in the 21st century. You have no idea what options there are if you chose to strike a match and put on a show.
Your beliefs about what is true limits your options. Among artists and musicians, the belief that you can’t truly earn a living unless you “make it big” is generally accepted. Even those of us who have chosen the creative life still deep down believe we’re destined for either poverty or fame. There’s no middle ground. And that belief keeps us repeating the same behaviors that actually sabotage the viability of our craft as a serious career option.
If you are willing to wander for a while so that you can find the right place for yourself in the world, you are just going to have to become comfortable with being uncomfortable. Losing connections, comforts and established beliefs can make you feel like you’re losing all sense of safety. You can’t do it all at once. It will take a long time to identify those ideas, habits and people that are unhealthy, but breaking their influence over your life is only way to move forward to something better.