When I first started on this writing/life-changing adventure, more than a year and a half ago I did it out of a feeling of desperation.
I was desperately unhappy with my work life. I was desperate to feel a sense of direction in my life again, a feeling that I hadn’t had in years. I wanted to feel like I was on a path again, in the way that I had been as kid, always taking one logical step after the next.
Because at age 23 I somehow impossibly reached the end of my road. I had always expected to go to grad school and get a PhD and do the academia thing — and then when the time came to apply to PhD programs during my senior year of undergraduate I discovered (much to my then-surprise!) that there was nothing I wanted to do less.
After four years of suffocating and suffering in the name of education, the thought of voluntarily requesting six more years of such torture ached in my body like a physical pain — telling me that there was simply nothing left of myself to give. The boundless energy that is generally the purview of youth seemed to have withered in me in a haze of panicked labor and sleep-wrecked nights.
I wound up with a Master’s degree, working a job I didn’t really like, and at the time I was pretty miserable. I felt stuck and lost and generally adrift on a somewhat random and malignant sea. I desperately wanted to find my way out, but I really had no idea what I was doing or where to start.
And then I started writing.
And something miraculous shifted somewhere along the way and the job that I hated became a job that (most days, at least) I actually rather like.
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When I first started writing I never expected any of these things to happen. A year and a half ago I turned back to my writing in desperation, seeking a way out with no real expectation of finding one.
To look at me today you’d never know anything in particular had changed. I still work my job and even though I’ve started writing this blog and working on a book I can’t say that I’ve really taken action toward finding another career.
And yet, paradoxically, I’m beginning to think that I have.
In the past few weeks I’ve been astonishingly, perhaps even alarmingly happy. And there’s nothing in my external environment that has changed to prompt this, really. I still work my job. I still spend ten hours a week on the bus. I still wake up earlier than I’d like to.
But suddenly the misery that haunted my days two years ago is gone. In retrospect, it’s been shifting for a long time, sometimes so slowly I didn’t even realize it was happening.
And in that shifting I’ve discovered something that feels like magic.
The reason I’ve felt so stuck these past few years, both in my job and in getting my words out into the world, in jumping ship on all my old dreams and embarking on a new adventure, is simply that I was scared.
And I’m going to suggest that this is perhaps a reasonable and rational fear — I can’t imagine a universe in which it shouldn’t feel scary to leave behind everything that feels safe and secure and to leap into the unknown. This fear seems like a rational survival impulse.
But when it cropped up for me as I started to contemplate making big changes in my life, I found it became a paralytic. Unable to rationalize my way out of the fear, I became mired in it, unable to move forward in any way.
And for the last year and a half I’ve been searching for the way out of that paralysis. And I think I’ve finally figured it out.
Here’s the secret:
First be happy. Then be brave.
Because as my suffering and worry has transmuted into a kind of deep and peaceful joy in the past few weeks I’ve suddenly seen the way out. No longer am I terrified of doing the things I once found petrifying. No longer does the thought of my doing them strike fear into the core of my being.
Instead, I’m finding myself laughable. All those fears that kept me stuck now seem so absurd I can’t help but feel a kind of ceaseless delight as I think of them.
I’ve written before about some strategies for overcoming fear in which I suggested taking teeny tiny steps. I still think tiny steps add up to powerful progress and I used this strategy myself: I’ve been writing this blog that very few people read and sending out my weekly newsletter for more than a year now. And now I see that I wasn’t quite ready to really put myself out there, I wasn’t quite me enough to really feel safe in the outside world. But in writing here for the past year I’ve rediscovered those parts of myself and ultimately I’ve begun to feel safe.
And those were important steps for me to take along the way, but they were never going to be enough to take me all the way toward being the voice in the world that I dream of being or give me the kind of reach I would need to really take this book I’m writing and make it a success.
So turtle steps are a great place to start — but sometimes I think you also need to make big, scary leaps.
And if you find yourself needing to make a leap, I’d like to suggest you not try and blast your way out through the fear. In my experience this doesn’t work.
Instead, get happy first. Get ridiculously joyful and grateful.
And then I think you’ll find that suddenly the world just doesn’t seem so scary.
And then you might laugh at yourself a bit 🙂