~ God told me to be an artist, week 79.
Friday 12th July 2024.
It's no mystery that trusting in something you cannot yet see is hard. I think we can all agree with that. It's scary and a huge move.
Like super huge.
It's a posture that comes easier to some more so than others and that can be for a whole host of reasons. I wouldn't want to assume them all here but for me I found it challenging to imagine myself as an entrepreneur because I couldn't see anyone in my immediate frame of reference who had done it before. Aka, no one in my family or friends circle was doing it, not until I was much older anyhow.
All I had for a long time was a persistent voice inside pushing me forward. Essentially it got super loud and I just couldn't ignore. So I decided to take a leap and trust it.
Ultimately I've realised through my journey that if you want to flourish, aka find your purpose and live it out, then you're going to have to trust that small voice inside that tells you to go for it. The very same that edges you closer to an idea over and over. The whispering that asks, "but what if you are hearing correctly?" causing you to pick yourself up after you fall and try again.
Trusting my intuition is not something that has ever come easily to me. Not at all. You might be surprised to hear that when you see me living and working as an artist but yeah, I've had to really work at it. It's hard enough battling your own head as you try and traverse this path but there's something else you'll likely encounter that's just as hard. If not more so.
One of the biggest hurdles I've come to notice over the years in regards to the process and practice of trusting, is other people's response to you as you do it.
The best way I know to explain it is the vegan effect? It's when on the rare occasion that as a vegan you don't talk about being one [I'm allowed to say that, I used to be one], but your prescence sets off a chain reaction no matter what. That even if you don't talk about your veganism people still take the time to tell you why they're not one. It's like, "look, being a vegan is cool, but here's why I think it actually isn't realistic or even good." I remember standing in conversations like this when I literally didn't even talk about my eating habits and people where telling me that I was wrong or why they just wouldn't do it. It used to make me laugh because whilst I was a vegan I wasn't on a mission of conversion, I was trying to settle a sea of raging hormones and bodily responses to food, no disrespect to other people but I wasn't interested in their opinions to veganism, I was just trying to live my life without huge digestion discomfort and trying to get off a horrific hormonal rollercoaster.
But people 'needed' to always tell me their opinions. Not because I asked them too, but because the way I was living made them feel a mirror was being held up to their life and choices, and they responded as such.
This is the same as what I've experienced with stepping out into and trusting the process of a less stable/ less traditional career path, people think you're commenting on their choices when actually, you're just not.
Once I realised that some people were projecting their own discomfort with trusting onto me I began to find the entire experience of trusting my internal voice a whole lot easier. The opinions people just had to tell me throughout my journey weren't/ aren't actually about me at all. They were/ are speaking to themselves.
Of course there are trusted friends I have spoken to and asked their advice and feedback, I don't claim to be all knowing and Lord knows I struggle with being brave. But the comments that I didn't seek, I decided I could let them fall away. Like water off a duck's back as they say, not aggressively rejecting them but saying, you know what, that's ok that person feels that way about my life, I just simply don't agree.
I've come to see that the nervousness myself and other's feel about the process of trusting in the unknown is a shared thing. We all feel it at some point in life. But I've just decided to not let it dictate the trajectory of where I'm headed. To clarify it's not about better or more evolved, It's just responding differently to a very common, shared human experience.
Standing in this way of understanding, looking at the memories of people telling me why my choices were maybe too bold or unsafe, softens how I feel now. I don't feel anger or resentment towards those exchanges or people, I actually feel a deep love and softness towards them now. They're often not acting out of concern, they're just scared themselves and I can understand and empathise with how that feels.
I also feel a rising commitment to becoming the person I didn't see growing up, the person doing things differently from the usual grind of life.
Maybe that's my role in all of this, to show some empathy and acceptance for those who don't feel the same way and know that that's actually okay, good even. To know that my job isn't to convince anyone with my words, but show them something in the way I live.
Maybe my children will see entrepreneurship as a genuine option because they see me ahead of them doing it? Perhaps they still won't be into that, but they'll experience something positive in the witnessing of practiced bravery that they can transfer to some other area of their life?
That sounds pretty good to me.
Other people's nervousness is something that doesn't penetrate me as deeply now. I can allow them to tell me in love [or in whatever haha], then gather up their opinions in my hands and set them down away from my heart, choosing to take the step in the direction I know to be true regardless.
Turns out you can't control how people feel about your life or how they choose to live theirs, but that's actually brilliant because then you can just focus on how you live yours and show a little more softness towards the breadth of humanity and the shared experience of fear. We all experience it and we can choose how we respond to it.
See you next week, Cath x
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