My journey to connect with purpose and passion.
I've been writing quite a bit lately. Here are some of my favourite stories from this past week or so:
I had a dear friend leave me a message. To say it resonated would not even begin to cover it. I felt my cells shift and start to vibrate, threatening to rip me apart into a red mist.
A beloved friend grows wistful when she speaks about her little boy and his endless love.
Photo credits: Anjan Chatterjee and Jill Clardy
It’s time to come clean: I’m a professional procrastinator. I’ve spent my life honing my ability to procrastinate with the best of them. I may even be one of the greats. I have certainly invested far more than ten thousand hours in mastering the panic induced, Hail Mary, 5am work frenzy after wasting an entire day playing video games.
I’ve hated myself for this. It was the dark, dirty secret that everyone knew about, but I pretended didn’t exist.
I would spend hours in the bathroom at work reading productivity porn. I purchased every notebook and get-shit-done framework I could find. They lined my shelves and desk like a secret identity. Clearly, I had my shit together, only I didn’t. I could use the very tools designed to improve productivity to further my procrastination agenda.
1. It is your duty to not have it all figured out.
Often, meeting someone new starts with a question. What do you do? Or, for those in University, what is your major?
The person asking the question is pushing an agenda, whether they mean to or not. They want their social standing validated. They spent years of effort and sacrifice in order to live lacklustre, if comfortable, lives. They collect titles like trophies and display them proudly.
For those of us who don’t have it all figured out, we sense the social pressure that comes with these simple questions. We are supposed to pin a label haphazardly to our chest, so that others in our community can judge the value we bring.
But what if we just quit our job and no longer have a valid title? Or what if we are thinking of changing majors, or even dropping out of school?
I’ve come to forgive myself for most of them, anyway.
I was in confounding debt and had just quit my full-time job. My plan was ridiculously naive: turn what little talent and gear I had into a full-time living as a professional photographer. To my credit, I managed to survive and land enough gigs to almost pay my bills. Only, I was so desperate for paying gigs that I ended up doing work that made me want to cry.
Most of my revenue was coming from corporate events. Worse, I was charging dear friends ridiculous rates for headshots in order to deal with a growing panic and inability to make ends meet.
I began to dread photography gigs. I had turned away from a successful career at age 40 to follow my heart. To begin to hate photography was to rip out a part of my soul and pour lemon juice into the wound.
Many are quick to reject a fear of success. It sounds like a crazy concept. Why should we be afraid of climbing the corporate ladder or achieving fame and fortune?
It all comes down to how we define success.
Each of us has a purpose, a calling, that beckons to us. For some, it is a loud voice, and for others, a soft whisper, safely buried under years of avoidance and excuse. To contemplate answering this call, and to succeed at doing so, is to recognize a tidal wave of trepidation and even outright panic.
Whereas, the fame and success sold to us as worthy of pursuit is quite shallow. It is the homogenized and pasteurized version of success, made safe and simple to consume. It does not exist to provide meaning, happiness or fulfillment. It is a tool society uses to maintain the status quo.
