This morning, I attended a wake/viewing for a long-time friend, someone I had known since I was a very young girl who passed away quite suddenly late last month. Surrounded by other friends from my childhood, I became acutely aware of how out of place I often feel around them and the struggle within myself to make myself fit into a world that I don’t really want to fit into.
There isn’t anything wrong at all with the reality in which my friends live. It works for them. It’s what they know and have come to accept is a “normal” way of life. You put in your 40 hours a week, enduring all manner of situations that annoy you, so you can earn money to buy a car, house, clothes, food, etc. That's how life works, right?
As a treat for your hard work and sacrifice, you spend your down time doing things that feel more fun: watching the latest crop of television programming intended to either entertain or infuriate you, going to the movies, maybe, taking a cruise some place when you have vacation time, provided you have enough money, attending church, or checking out a new or familiar restaurant. If you're married or have a family, you might do something with your partner and kids, or not. You stress about bills, the mortgage, car notes, your spouse and/or kids, and you get together to commiserate about your stupid bosses and co-workers, how your partner or kids are making you nuts, or how challenged you are trying to manage all the cadre of ailments you been diagnosed with.
If it seems I’m being judgmental, I’m not. My friends and family are content with their lifestyles—they’ve chosen it, consciously or unconsciously. Doesn’t matter, they seem content to do what they do.
As for me, I’ve always wanted more, or rather, something vastly different, as “more” implies judgment. Ever since I was a teenager, tween even, I've desired and still desire a different way of being, doing, and living my life. I could see it. I could feel it. It moved me to action on the one hand and terrified me on the other. Try as I might, I haven’t been able to let it go. In my imagination, my daydreams, I saw a preview of what my life could be and I cannot let it go.
As I’m pondering all of this, it hit me—the guilt I’ve been carrying with me since my tween, teenage, years for daring to want to be, do, and experience something different.
I have been that double-minded man spoken of in the Bible who asks yet wavers, attempting to walk the fence or tight rope between two worlds/two lives: the one that I truly want to experience and have long dreamed and continue to dream about—the one that keeps me up some nights and terrifies me—and the one that I think I’m supposed to experience because it’s the life that people like me live and it's "just the way things are." That other life, the one that haunts me, that’s for special people, other people, NOT ME people.
Granted, I have come close to stepping into that life in physical reality, damn close, throughout various periods of my adulthood only to watch it collapse like a stack of cards typically because of my actions. I’m only now realizing in this moment, that it hasn’t been so much my actions causing my dreams to collapse before me but my beliefs about what achieving them might mean for me and for those I care about. What will my friends think of me if I...? My family? My parents’ friends and associates?
I am a minister’s daughter after all and many of the dreams and desires for my life aren’t readily accepted among those in my or my family’s social circle of God-fearing Pentecostal Christians. Nor are they readily accepted as being appropriate or even achievable for members of my ethnic group or among the extended family consisting of the people who live/lived in the neighborhood in which I grew up—the people who have known me since my earliest memories of myself.
Fearing rejection, fearing loss of acceptance from my loved ones and, honestly, fearing the responsibility and the public scrutiny that can come with stepping into the spotlight, I self-sabotage. Trust me, this hasn’t been done consciously. Doesn’t matter though, as the results are the same. Rather than confidently heading in the directions of my dreams, I end up far off in the opposite direction.
If I were writing this five years ago, I would believe it’s part of God’s divine plan—that He is or was the one throwing up roadblocks because He wanted me to go in a different direction. I now know better. It is me and only me stopping me.
I want to be loved and accepted by those I love and care for, but at what price? When is the cost of fitting in and conforming too high? When is the sacrificing of your desires to please others too great? When is contracting oneself to avoid standing out so as not to risk being rejected/cut down by your tribe simply not worth the inner pain and suffering? Really, what does it profit a person (me) to gain the love of the whole world (or at least the people I know in this world) and lose her (my) very soul?
These are the questions plaguing my heart today. Truth, whenever I do that fitting in thing or contracting myself to be more acceptable to others, I always feel this “ick” afterward. I believe it’s my inner self’s way of calling me on my BS—“just stop it!”
I know the life I desire is here for me now; it is only waiting for me to choose it and commit to it. I also know that the universe, my external world, only ever reflects back to me what I am feeling or thinking internally. As long as I continue to believe that pursuing my dreams means being alienated from or rejected by those I love and care about, that will be my reality.
I have a choice to make and a life to live. Now's the time to get on with it. Teetering the fence between two lives is no longer a viable option for me.
"All denial is self denial." Stuart Lindell, direct student of Neville Goddard
"If you construct in your mind a wall where there actually is none, you will force yourself to behave as though such a wall is actually pervasively in your way." Kidest Om
