“What Doesn’t Kill You” Isn’t Here to Kill You.
So stop playing dead.
“Everyone has a price.”
People think that when we say this, we’re saying “everyone can be bought.”
But what they’re actually saying is that everyone has a deep, mortal wound in them that refuses to heal. A wound that they would pay anything to see closed up and sent on its way.
And we do pay for it, usually paying toward addictions that make us feel better because we don’t know how to heal these wounds. We often don’t understand them, can’t even see them clearly.
We pay for TV subscriptions, junk food, sex, video games, gambling. Maybe stuff for (yet another) hobby we won’t pursue, or even therapy.
We’ll do anything to avoid facing ourselves, the biggest and scariest monsters we know.
One of the best ways to find purpose is to look at these wounds. Areas in your life where you feel star-crossed.
Not as a result of choices you made, choices made for you, or anything that happened to you: just circumstances you landed in at birth. Born under the sign of Screwed.
What do I feel like my own wounds are?
-Hopeless introversion. No one knows me, and I don’t get them, and I never have. Most days, I’m ok with this. And yet, I feel alone, unable to connect with this alien species I’m surrounded by.
-No great role models. There is this beautiful life I’ve seen on screens, heard tell of, but is not modeled by anyone I know. Certainly not anyone I could ask questions of. At 43, anyone I had is starting to die off anyway. This problem probably led to the problem above.
-Fixed mindset. Combined with the above, I’ve gone through most of my life feeling like my circumstances will never change. There is no way out.
What do these all have in common?
-I’ve come to love/hate them. I’ve lived in such close quarters with them in my mind, for my whole life, that I’ve argued for them. At least as often as I’ve bemoaned them, I’ve heard myself make excuses for them.
I’ve taken them up, not as wounds, but as armor against a world that they’ve told me was against me and had no interest in me.
-I’ve seen them in everyone around me. The horror stories narrated above are reinforced by some of the closest people to me (not that I have many of those).
This makes it difficult for me to voice a story that is different from what we’ve been talking about together. That would become a voice of dissent, disconnection. When you already feel alone, you don’t want to drive a wedge between yourself and the few friends you have left.
What can we do about them?
-Get friends. New friends, more friends, different friends than what we have. Ones that aren’t convinced they and their world are dead already.
(You can still love the ones you have. But you may encounter resistance from them when you start spouting off about changing your life and making new choices.)
-Read new stories. Read bios about fascinating people, learn from them. Get their tips and tricks on what worked for them, and find ways to make them work for you.
-Get out in the world. This is a tough one. Everything in your head says this is a bad idea, because the best way to keep you safe is for you to stay in your air-conditioned box.
But the world outside is where you’ll test ideas. Where you’ll meet fascinating people (no, they’re not in those apps on your phone). Where you’ll find wonders like fun highway detours, cloud formations, or a random dragonfly tapping on the cafe window in the morning. Wonderful and strange things come into your world, if you keep your mind open.
-Learn new things. Adopting new skills takes time, but it’s how you develop new interests (not the other way around). New knowledge helps to break down the fixed mindset (and develop growth mindset). It makes you more interesting, even more hireable!
But above all, exposure to new knowledge is what may lead you to finding and growing your spark. Your gifts. Your superpower.
People who are plugged into a purpose can’t be bought cheaply — it’s one reason our 9-to-5 jobs don’t care much about how satisfied we are working with them.
They know if we settled for nothing less than our life’s calling, we’d never let them get away with wasting our time and energy for minimum-wage.
If you can’t yet escape the daily grind of working for other people, then find what lights you up. Let those passions guide you to meeting new people, developing new skills. And let those loves lead you like that dragonfly on your way to true joy.
Great post EC. We are so limited by what we think but it doesn't have to be that way. Plus, I think most people lead messy lives, rather than those perfect "got it all together" lives we see on the media.
Getting out into the world and meeting new people with new attitudes is fantastic. I'm 62 so 20 years older than you, and some of the people I know are very gloomy about the future, while others are looking for new opportunities and making plans.
Life is what you make it. After all, customs and social conventions are all made up anyway by people in the past who weren't any cleverer than us ( I got that bit from a book but I can't think of the title or the author - it's the guy that runs Mindvalley).
So much in this article resonated EC. Great tips to open up our experiences when we want to challenge the status quo we landed with early in life.
Most people know when things aren't quite right.
Use that curiosity to discover a better, healthier way.