A Battle of Values

Even in trying to be our best selves, to seek higher values, we cannot escape the influence our society has.

I never felt that I fit. I couldn’t see myself in many of the roles my peers pursued. I wanted to be everything, to try everything, to experience the world and its mysteries.

They would ask what I wanted to be. They would have career day, a parade of adults peddling vocations. A sense of panic was born, and has not stopped growing, even as I mark my middle-thirties. I should know what I’m good at by now, I should have a plan. 

I played at having a plan, going to college and letting small choices become my paths toward career. Then there was a job, and I became the position’s title. I lived to work, and slowly the spark of curiosity that guided me began to fade. The underlying values lost their meaning. 

I once valued creativity as play, as openness, as discovery of truths deep within. 

I once valued curiosity as the urge to experience life as it happened, exploring the wild places or losing myself in books.

I once knew the joy of connection, sharing secrets with friends and enjoying traditions with family.

I was losing my awareness of self, even as I amassed degrees and certificates. My new compass was career, its values lied in money, purchase power, title, and recognition.

I hid illness for over a decade, ashamed that I couldn’t thrive, accepting the verdict of broken. I tried to fill that hole by nesting, collecting things (and debt). I bounced through the internet dating world and a few futureless relationships.

And so I left. I left a career and a title, and even now I wonder if that was a mistake, with the weight of student loan debt darkening the future. 

From outside that fast-paced world of successful careers and competitive consumption, things changed. I could breath. I felt better. In all the ways that mattered, I was thriving.

But now I nursed another kind of shame. My small savings began to shrink. I couldn’t afford to live in the city, I didn’t know how to get more money, and I had lost any sense of confidence in my abilities. 

That version of reality where job titles and bank accounts equals success clings to my mind. I’ve shied away from writing, because what could I possibly say that matters.

I fight the sense of panic daily – how do I live in a way that fits my values? I am lucky and grateful to have help to get through a difficult time, but what happens when we are priced out of our values?

This post doesn’t have a profound ending, but perhaps a small crack in my mask of positive spin. We are how we act in the endlessness of the moment. Perhaps our resilience to our own suffering is more important than realizing our fullest potential in the good times.

In this moment, I am faced with limited prospects and my own lack of imagination and initiative in creating my own future. I am humbled and grateful and scared (but not alone), I am trying to find a way forward even as my own mind blocks my efforts to see beyond my narrow view.

Opening to Creativity

Humans are meant to be creative.

I used to read about or see others in highly creative ventures, as painters, crafters, makers, and feel a sense of admiration and envy. I valued the production of something useful and beautiful out of raw materials and skilled effort. 

Yet despite this desire to create, I had justifications about why my life and job were boring automations, with the rare application of problem solving. Creativity was a gift only given to the artistic few. These people had true talent, or unique disciple, some elusive qualities I must lack.

In truth, I had been creative in my youth, but for various reasons, creative habits had dropped away, and I was left forgetting how to let go of the micro manager that is the mind, forgetting how to let go of the control we think we have.
As I became more open spiritually, that hold on control loosened. I found myself attempting to ‘be a writer.’ 

Identifying as a thing is fraught with trouble. That mind-nag is always reminding us we are playing at a thing, and so it feels illegitimate. We are frauds pretending to be something, hoping that by making ourselves and acquiring the paraphernalia of a role, we can be it.

Many times I have convinced myself I could not be a writer, an artist, a creative because I didn’t have the successes, the credentials, the years of development or body of work. I gave up before even opening the door.
Recently, I’m of the mind that creativity is a process, a state in which we quiet the mind and open ourselves. It is the practice of an act, any act. Instead of being, we become the process. Not ‘I am a writer, but ‘I am writing’ – until the I falls away. We do not exist independent of the process and connection to the energies of life. To truly do something, we must open ourselves to life, to energy, to the muse – whatever we want to call that connection that is both inside and outside and a part of us.

Creativity is playing at a thing and becoming that process, the pen to paper, the flow of words, the imagining outside ourselves to something mysterious. Creativity is spiritual, it is visceral, it is as simple as breathing and as complex as building worlds.

In my own opening to creativity, I finally had no expectations to be something. I had tried and failed to approach a practice of writing, only to end up battling my own insecurities each time. But in the simple act of learning to braid I found myself disarmed, present, open. 

It happened without trying or even noticing at first. Through practice that was not at all serious, just a casual hobby, I found inspiration, passion, voice. I put aside ego and let myself just be creating. 

And once that door is open, creativity creeps in and grows in every corner, until life is lush and green with possibility.

Finding a Path to Honest Reflection

It is pretty easy and pleasant to talk about material things and processes in the journey to a more simple, deliberate, minimal, meaningful life. A decade ago when I was beginning my effort to downsize things, evaluate how green or how joyful my daily life was and could be, sharing was just as exciting as doing. 

I could write or talk at length about simplifying my personal care routine, improving the food I prepared for myself or served to my pets, or embracing the value of my own time. I got more quiet as the space I created for myself shifted my focus inward. 

In every mind there are plenty of dark spots that are hard enough to illuminate for ourselves without also opening up for others.

But that has been the aim of my current path – openness.  Openness to relationships, to experience, and to all the wisdom life holds, pleasant, endearing, or otherwise.
I’ve had many opportunities to be open and honest about my own story, and it’s been a hard walk to take. Our self-identity can be so fragile. 

I used to build my identity around the experience I was inhabiting. During my school years and in college, I was a “good student,” and letters and marks could strengthen my indentity as such, or break me down to nothing. I ran from subjects that had given me challenge, so that I could hold on to being the smart one. 

What makes us unique and interesting is not what we are doing or have done, not the geography we find ourselves in, and not the labels used to classify our actions and experiences for telling stories about ourselves. Each of us will have great moments and low moments, stories grounded in human experience. 
When my inner critic is being particulary harsh and effective, I will tell myself that there is nothing I can write that will be good enough or interesting enough to stand. I have to remind myself, that the way I meet my experiences is where my unique story lives. Each of us has the power to take a familiar theme and weave it into something special that can touch another person. 

How many stories and songs tell of heartbreak, yet the right one at the right moment can bring is to our knees, reach us and resonate.

We cannot get to that place without stripping away the protections and armor, facing our experience, our story, and our truth openly. Then sharing it.