When Your Shoes Feel Too Big to Fill: The Fears that Stalled a Calling
Over a year ago, I moved into a new studio apartment. I had just ended a relationship. I wasn’t sad, nor lonely. My family and friends were more worried for me than I was because they didn’t know the amount of reflective work I had done before taking this step.
Around that time, my concerned father would call me countless times a day. On the other end of the line, I heard the typical questions “are you ok?” “did you eat?” “how are you feeling?” as well as questions he didn’t ask “are you depressed?” “do you think you can move on?” I remember telling him that I felt like a different person — and that it was an opportunity for growth for me; that I didn’t have regrets so long as I learned something from the process. To which he replied, “I know who you are!” His words echoed over the phone receiver in waves that vibrated all the way to my core. It implied that I did not — that I had not been living authentically. I was slightly offended by the sentiment. How could he know me more than I do?
I dated a man for a while that encouraged my writing. When I finally started posting blogs on my site more frequently, and I mentioned it to him, he said he hadn’t pushed it before because I seemed cagey every time he brought it up. Well, this is what people do when they’re not ready to answer a calling. They find every excuse, activity, busy work imaginable to slow the train down.
“To whom much is given; from him much is required.” — Luke 12:48
For years my father and friends have been telling me to write a book. Though I wrote poetry in high school for which I won awards, and I took creative writing courses in college, my writing was a hobby. I didn’t want it to become something I had to do — not for survival or out of external demand. I wasn’t ready for the calling. I did everything in my power not to move forward. I started a blog and immediately stopped writing because I was not too fond of how the site looked. I didn’t “launch” my website with a public announcement because I feared judgment. I prioritized other personal goals that I thought were more important: financial independence. So, I got a part-time job working at Starbucks so I wouldn’t have to write.
As I mentioned, and as my blog describes. I spend a lot of time learning from failures, observing patterns, behaviors, finding gaps, drilling down to why these gaps are there (5 Whys) in my professional career as well as my personal life. Through inner work, I discovered that I had what most people in the world had: generalized anxiety stemming from childhood fears of abandonment — fears of disappointing others — namely my parents, God, and myself. I had bought into the idea that I needed to validate my ego by obtaining acceptance from others, by replaying illusions of abandonment. Sometimes these are stories we make up in childhood to understand our circumstances. Children get addicted to forming these biases and grow into adults who think these stories are the truth. But this isn’t the truth. Reality is seeing my parents for who they really are, who love me unconditionally in the best way they can, in a way so nurturing, forgiving, and unassuming that I cried when I realized that I had held onto false beliefs for so long.
The inner work I had done afforded me a better perspective on my life and the decisions I had been making up to that point. I saw that my ego had been defying my progress this whole time because it fears the unknown. That’s it! When I stopped living based on what my fears were telling me, I started to see my calling as my catharsis. Some people play sports, music, paint, photograph. When I began seeing writing as a process that didn’t require some outcome — publication, living off writing, I began to write, and the process itself became my calling.
The funny thing about the ego, as Kyle Cease has developed a vast Tony Robbin-esque following describing so eloquently, is that it will “create a problem so that it can solve it.” The ego is bored because evolution has afforded us the ability to live a relatively problem-free life (at least one in which we can shelter in place from the elements and animals that want to eat us that would typically require the ego’s fight or flight responses).
While the experience was rewarding because it reminded me of the value of a dollar, it felt out of alignment with my goals.
“You cannot solve a problem from the same level of thinking that created the problem in the first place.” — Albert Einstein
Believing in the thoughts the ego projects keeps you in a place of fear (I will never be a writer) instead of abundance (I am a writer). Thoughts are illusions fabricated by the ego. They aren’t real. We are what we think, and we often confirm our realities because we’ve exhausted so much energy fearing the problem that when it does happen, we believe it’s because it was a problem when it’s confirmation bias.
We all have been or currently are addicted to thoughts or something else. The temporary gratification we feel as a result of obsessive thinking is as much of an addiction as drugs, alcohol, sex, food, television, the news, politics. These things “soothe” us, so we don’t have to do something we have never done, so we don’t have to feel emotions, so we don’t have to look at ourselves in the mirror and just ask “hey, what’s going on?”
“Every addictive pattern you might have in your life is because of the illusion that the only way to avoid death and find love is to search for something outside of yourself.”
-Kyle Cease, I hope I Screw this Up: How Falling in Love with Your Fears Can Change the World
I walked into the Library of Congress one day to research a book I am writing, and that day I started to write, letting it all flow out from within. My calling is writing about my life. It’s not about anything outside of me even though my continued inspiration for this book is a result of a series of synchronous events. An epiphany, a stroll through a bookstore, a book that caught my eye, a woman on a train who did her thesis on a topic covered in the book she saw in my hands, conversations with friends, strangers in coffee shops, grocery stores, and ride-sharing service drivers that kept propelling me forward. Though these events seem external, they were only possible because I am living more authentically and people are responding to the shift in energy. I can no longer expend energy trying to stop this train, so now I am riding it.
I am writing: a blog; a book of poetry; a memoir-adjacent book on sex, shame, and dogma. I am not writing to solve any of the world’s problems. I don’t have that ability. I am writing because I have been called to fill these shoes, to live this life for which I am grateful. I know who I am.