The Work Of You
Of all the things I get to do by owning my life and business, the discipline and therapy of writing brings me closest to my truest self. In every blog, I share a piece of my heart. This one is an excerpt from my upcoming publication. It’s called “The Work of You.”
lt would be one of the greatest human tragedies to live most of your life as someone else. A life constructed by external expectations, requirements, programming, rules, blueprints designed by someone or something apart from you.
Oh, but you’ve done a good job living that life programmed for you. From birth to adulthood, the outside norms, beliefs, prejudices, and needs hovered over you, and you took them, internalizing them into your body and mind like they were immutable laws of nature. You ingested the daily poison pill and eventually your systems, the ones that make you YOU, began to quietly shut down. Your imagination, your creativity, your sense of wonder, your internal music.
And then your soul stopped singing. Now it just hums like a machine. Like the second-hand refrigerator where we keep the leftovers, plugged in and parked in the garage. You are “Avatar You.” You are “You-Adjacent.” You are “Hand-Me-Down You.” You are a “You-Marionette.”
And yet, I can still see You in there.
I can see the tiny glow of light made up of all the particles that are Purely You. I can still hear echoes of your soul song.
And so I call to the You that is YOU. I call you up. I call you out.
You will have to break the rules to get out. You will have to move straight through the barriers. You will have to erase the coding, a complete system reset. Both the good and bad must go for you to rebuild from scratch.
You will have to sit with yourself for long periods of time. It will feel like agony before it becomes bearable. Before it becomes bliss. You will have to disappoint and confuse people. Some people you really love. Some people you believe have power over you.
You will be misunderstood. Your character, your motives, even your name will be called into question. They will accuse you of trying to be something you are not, which will carve you on both sides since all you want is to become who you actually are. To live your life as your own.
You will be scared sh*tless. You wilI say “what if I lose everything”? And I won't sugarcoat it. You will—almost. You will lose everything that is not you. lt will feel incredibly destabilizing. It will feel like someone took all the bones out of your body. You will feel like you are now just a giant bag of emotion. Your brain won't work. All the passwords have been reset.
You will have to let yourself cry.
You will need to move your body. You will need to dance your imagination back to life. You will need to belly laugh your creativity awake. You will need to sing yourself back into wonder.
You will need to create new neural pathways through feeling, not doing. Knowing, not having the right belief. Creating, not downloading. Deciding, not obeying. Expanding, not shrinking. Living messy, not tidying yourself up. Becoming completely undone, to simply become.
As you do this, you will start to find that you really didn't break any rules. You will find they were never real to begin with. You will find that some of your programming wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t for you.
You will find that by disappointing, confusing, and angering people, you called them out too. You called them up.
You will start to notice that the tiny glow of light made up of all the particles that are Purely You have begun to expand and travel into your dormant systems, anointing them, kissing them awake, creating a combustible flow of energy that is closer to heaven than it is to earth.
And as you step with greater strength into your fire and light, you will find that much of your programming was rotten to the core, and you will burn it to the ground.
For a nanosecond, you will be tempted to regret the days you lived as someone else, but no. You will not waste one more second of the rest of your life living in a shadow world. You now understand that to exist in authenticity requires you to learn from the past, but live in the present.
That is because authenticity is not a life choice. It is a life work. And you will have to do the work. Right in this second, in this day, in this whole life.