When doing the scary thing is the only right next step.

Originally published May 2019.

Well, maybe one day I’ll figure out how to be a consistent blogger. I fell off the face of the blogging and social media earth again. (whoops) Here is my attempt at an updated return, because life is changing, as it does!

As many of you know, I quit my job in December 2017 to travel for the first half of 2018, but what you might not know is the entire time, my very set-in-stone controlled plan was to come back to the states, move to Durham or Asheville in North Carolina, get a casual job on the side, and finish and publish the book I have been writing on the side for a couple years, by the spring of 2019, and then move on with my life.

I got back.

I moved to Durham.

I got the casual job, working full time as a personal assistant/nanny for a family in Durham (boys aged 3&7), which was supposed to give enough time and emotional space to devote most of my emotional energy to writing.

And then I wrote.

Or at least I tried to, white-knuckling and clinging on to the plan I was “supposed” to follow, as any good future-planning human does. Thanks prefrontal cortex.

After I moved to Durham in August, my presence on my blog and social media accounts could no longer be a priority for many reasons, even though building my blog and social media profile this year (lol @ entrepreneurship in this hip advanced society) was another part of the plan that did not become reality.

And now it’s spring of 2019.

And guess what.

My book is not finished, much less published.

So what has happened between August 2018 and today? Ha. Big question that a quick blog post can’t do justice because dang that’s a lot of time, but I will do my best to stay the course of concision.

Turns out for a lot of reasons, the job wasn’t casual. I quickly found out I was working with yet another extremely explosive, challenging, and often violent kid, who, even with my dedicated attempt to bring in every de-escalation and emotional management tool and method I learned raising nine foster kids in a residential setting, left me frustrated, triggered, without answers most days, and definitely without much desire to open up the google document that contains the hundreds of pages of my book to add, tweak, edit, delete, add again. I knew pretty fast that this job was going to take a lot more of my mental and emotional energy than my strict plan had budgeted for.

Remember, I said realized, not accepted.

Even though I realized that expending most of my emotional and mental energy at work was not in the plan, and finishing my book was probably not realistic working full time with this specific job, I did not accept the possibility of having to change that plan. For the first couple months I constantly wrestled with it, trying to force myself into writing, because I told myself that this, THIS, is what I was doing this year, and doing anything but that exact “this” was failing, but mainly failing my own expectations of myself. I would pour through pages and pages of content that I have already written and see nothing but “not good enough.”

And unfortunately like most humans and their plans, once I decided on a plan it was hard to abandon ship, even though the ship was sinking, and it was sinking fast.

I strived. I forced.

Maybe I could write in the evenings when I got off work, or maybe I figure out how to write in between loads of laundry and errands and dinner prep and homework and explosive fits and three year old tantrums and potty breaks and play and crafts and clean-up and the never-ending need-filling that comes with working with children, even on the best days.

Mind you, this was all the while trying to settle into a new town, deal with the reversed culture shock of being back in the excess and wealth and busyness of America after spending so much time in rural Asia, get used to the foreign concept of not living out of a bag and having a bedroom for the first time in almost two years, build a new social network on little social energy that remained after exerting with the kids all day, navigate a really hard and confusing transition in my relationship with my partner, Peter, support friends and family in difficult situations and mental health spaces, while also trying to stabilize my own mental health which was not healthy and continuing to decline as winter approached, and the shadow of seasonal depression started to cover my eyes yet again.

Mind you, not only were all of those hurdles between me and a seat with my computer in my lap, but if somehow I did manage to get to a chair and table with my computer out, I then had to muster the stillness, energy and bravery required in order to sink down into the extremely vulnerable, exhausting, and sometimes triggering emotional space from which my book is written.

While yes, the narrative of my book is structured around the beautiful and exciting and often lighthearted solo adventure I took across the country in 2015, another significant aspect of this book is that I took the trip in the middle of a season of processing significant trauma and a spiritual deconstruction that was really painful and dark, all of which is portrayed in my inner dialogue and experience throughout. Just casually and quickly tapping in and out of that mental/emotional/spiritual headspace rooted in trauma for twenty or thirty minutes here and there throughout the mundane tasks of the work day was almost impossible.

If you have ever embarked on an endeavor to create a piece of art, you may have learned that when you try to expedite the process by forcing it to be birthed when there is absolutely no real time or space for your true self/voice to be fully embodied in it, creativity and inspiration seem to go missing pretty quickly, and anger and apathy and self-doubt rush in.

Am I really a writer? I don’t know if I can do this. I was supposed to do this so easily. Why is this so hard? I don’t even know if I care about this anymore. I hate writing. I hate this book. Why did I think I could do this? If it wasn’t for this job….  This was too ambitious. I’m not as good of a writer as _______, so I’ll never be successful. No one cares. No one wants to read this. All of this time will be wasted. I should just give up.

Oh the lies that we let ourselves latch onto.

I started to resent my job, because it was easy to blame an exhausting job for all of my emotional instability and for not being able to finish my book. I felt more and more depressed. I cried more last fall than I have in a long time. I stopped meditating. I wasn’t journaling. My relationship with food had become negative again. I wasn’t taking care of my body. I felt lonely even though I was surrounded by people. I missed the mountains and all of the people I love that live in them.

I lost myself a little, or maybe now that I’m looking at the gap between how I felt in December and how I feel now, maybe I lost myself a lot. I forgot how to hold on to my center, and I felt like I was being whipped around by my external reality and far from the stillness I found deep in mediation at the silent Buddhist meditation retreat I was at only a few months prior in Thailand. Where was that stillness now? Where was the peace?

I realize now that it was there, as it always is, because it never leaves us. I just forgot how to see it, to hear it, to feel it, to flow with it, to let it move through me.

So why didn’t you just quit, Em? You might ask.

You’re right. I did think about it. Heading into December I was back and forth between one, quitting my job and not working until I finished my book, two, reducing my hours to go part-time so that I could write more, or three, accept that my plan to finish my book by spring was not realistic, and decide to stay full time, find the light in my job, and save absolutely as much money as I could in preparation to take some time off of working come May when my lease was up in Durham.

I knew that not working at all was not in the cards for me, as I had just spent six months traveling and had spent most of my savings. Inneeded to work, and my relationship with writing had become so toxic and forced that I figured it would take me weeks of re-setting before I got anything done if I just went part time. So I went with the third option.

I had to accept once again, that I am very human, that I can’t do it all, and that human-ness is okay.

I had to learn for the thousandth time to accept (and remember from past experiences) that the plans I make for myself are not the only reality that could possibly be good for me, and when I attach myself to my future plans, my experience of the present is tainted, and I miss out on so much of the positivity and beauty of the now.

I wonder if anyone ever learns that the plans we create and attach ourselves to out of our need to feel power and control over our circumstances rarely actually help us, and more often than not cause us pain. I would like to hope that I do one day, but I know that I am human, and even though I might remember now, I will probably forget again, and will have to learn it all over again in a new way. We never stop coming back to the Center.

Eventually I found grace for my lack of energy. I found grace for the days I didn’t want to get out of bed. I found grace for my insecurity as a writer. I found grace for the fact that the timing I wanted for my life was not reality, and that was okay.

Sometimes giving ourselves permission to just be where we are instead of where we wish we were is the greatest gift of grace that we can offer to ourselves, to accept the full and entire reality, with all of its lack and despair and “not enough’s.”

I accepted that I just wasn’t going to finish my book this year, and with that simple acceptance of reality, that huge shadow over my eyes started to dissipate. I had a little more energy to throw myself more into my work.

I accepted that if working this job was going to be my reality, then I might as well fully show up to it with my whole self to see what it could teach me instead of constantly seeking ways to fit my plans into it.

I tried my best to hold on to my best intention to let the three year old be my teacher, to invite me into his world of wonder, with all of its beautiful questions and unknowns and insights, and not a day goes by that he doesn’t remind me that experiencing the world as a human is actually really weird and interesting and doesn’t make much sense, and that is okay.

I tried my best to show up to help bring positive and long-lasting change into the seven-year old’s life and help him establish emotional management skills and ways to identify, accept, and de-escalate his anger instead of resorting to violence and shutting down, help him become aware of his body and what it told him, encourage him and pour into him as he worked through his social anxiety and found confidence in himself.

And with the work of himself, the work of his parents, his teacher, and myself, the dude is an entirely new kid. Now of course there were so many days where I would still come home from work angry, triggered, exhausted, frustrated, wishing that it were easier and that it didn’t demand so much of my energy.

There were days I broke down because I felt like I didn’t have anything more to give. And those days were hard and they hurt, and I had to find ways to reorient my mindset and find ways to make sure I did things to re-fill my cup during my time off.

I signed up for another olympic distance triathlon to give me a reason to go to the gym and move my body,

I stopped using food as a drug to ground me in reality, and I started to re-established an embodied, healthy relationship with my full self, seeking mind/body/spirit integration. It’s warm again, so I spend way more time outside, and the seasonal depression feels far away most days now. I’ve been back in the kitchen. I feel more connected and present in the relationships in my life. I’ve been dancing every weekend which fills my soul.

And I haven’t touched my book in weeks and weeks. And that is okay.

Some days I still feel a ton of anxiety and shame about not getting done what I said I was going to do this year. And that is also okay, because at my core I know who I am is not what I achieve or do or produce or consume.

Now it is May.

I quit my job as a nanny in Durham May 14th.

And then I’m doing the scary thing.

I’m going to be a full-time writer for the first time.

Maybe just for a couple months. Or maybe if you and a couple thousand other people buy my book once it’s done, I might be able to write for a few more after that.  I’m going to do the scary thing of not having a day job at all, give myself over to creativity, and just see where I end up, because it is the only right next step.

I’m going to make no money. Actually, I am basically employing myself out of the savings I have been dedicated to building this year in preparation for this very thing.

Some might think this decision is financially unwise, and I understand, because life is scary and watching our savings decrease in our bank account by choice is counterintuitive to everything that a capitalist society preaches, but I have a deep knowing that this is the next step for me. I achieved my goal of paying off all of my student loans by 2019, so without debt over my head anymore, and since I know I don’t buy things just to buy things (thanks minimalism), I’m not concerned about investing a good chunk of my own money in exploring a craft that I value.

If I don’t do this for myself I am always going to wonder “what-if,” and I try not to do “what if’s” in my life. I don’t know what that means besides finishing this book. It just needs to be out of me. It needs to be made. From the past couple of years of day jobs, I have realized that my book won’t get finished unless I can wake up and be in it for most of my working hours, keeping a consistent writing space in my life. Some artists can make the craft/day job balance  work, and I am thoroughly impressed by them, but I haven’t mastered that balance yet. Maybe writing could one day be my day job. I’m not attached to that outcome, and am not putting expectations that this is going to bring a huge financial return for me. I might not even break even. But regardless what comes of it, I have to not make money doing it first. And I’m okay with that.

For the past couple years I’ve been swimming upstream against the “normal” and “socially acceptable” way to be a woman in her early twenties in America (can you guess what my Enneagram type is?). It is often confusing, and I often question if I should go back to university to finish my degree or pursue a more “stable” career. There is often obvious judgement when people hear my question “So what do you do?,” especially during this season of living in the Research Triangle, where it seems like everyone is a doctor or getting their masters or PhD in something really sophisticated at Duke or Chapel Hill.

I mean to their defense, my answers since 2015 have been:

“So what do you do?” I nanny part time and write on the side. (fall 2015 – spring 2016)

“So what do you do?” I work at a residential foster home and live out of my car and write on the side (fall 2016 – end of 2017)

“So what do you do?” I’m an unemployed, homeless, college dropout living out of a backpack in Asia, and I write on the side. (my personal favorite answer, first half of 2018)

“So what do you do?” I’m a full time nanny and personal assistant for a family and Durham, and I write on the side. (fall 2018 – spring 2019)

Not exactly the most socially affirmed ways of living.

Unfortunately we are trained, either consciously or subconsciously, to put people in boxes according to what degree they have (or don’t have), what amount of money they make (or don’t make), and we forget that there are other ways to do life besides “go to college, get a bachelor’s, maybe get a master’s, go into a lot of debt, immediately work 40-60 hours a week in a career that you may or may not enjoy for the rest of your life.” The mainstream adult pursuit of happiness is not necessarily a bad or wrong way to do life, but it is just not the way I am doing life. Maybe I will one day, but I know that I don’t have to in order to feel confident or happy or successful.

So in this season, my answer to the question, “So what do you do?”

Well friends,

I’ll technically be unemployed (or maybe self-employed?), but my answer will finally just be,

Hi, my name is Em. And I’m a writer.

Not the best, not published yet, not perfect, not consistent, not experienced, not with much of an idea of “how” to actually make this thing come to fruition.

But I know that am a writer. And when I forget, I have people in my life that constantly remind me that I am a writer, and I thank each and every one of you for your encouragement these past couple years of rapidly changing life.

So, I am finally just going to write.

My book will be done when it is done, and I am going to try my best not to squeeze the life out of it by striving and forcing this time. Maybe when it’s done I’ll write another. Or maybe I won’t. We’ll see.

I have no idea what this will look like. It will probably be really hard and confusing, because even our greatest dreams coming true do not come without their heartbreaks and challenges, but I trust that it will be good. It will be fruitful. It will change me. It will lead me to the next thing, whether that next thing involves more writing or not.

Cheers to doing the scary thing, even when it is not what society tells us we are “supposed” to do in order to be “successful.”

If you are debating doing a scary thing in your life, whether that be quitting a job that you have to shrink yourself for, applying for a new job that pays less but would bring you more joy, booking a plane ticket, ending a relationship, starting a relationship, sending a letter, submitting an application, moving to a new town, downsizing, getting rid of excess, saying “I’m sorry” to someone, forgiving someone, pursuing the hobby you’ve always wanted, signing up for lessons, or even something less drastic like buying less meat or eliminating plastic waste from your life, anything that might mean change, or risk, or uncertainty, or instability, if you have the means to do it, I encourage you to push into that space, find a way to give yourself the gift of being the most full and whole and actualized and thriving version of yourself that you can be.

The world needs us as ourselves.

Not put-in-a-box self.

Not a repressed self.

Not a hidden self.

Not a pretending self.

Not a judgemental self.

Not a smaller self.

Not an attached-to-control-and-security self.

Not an attention-seeking self.

Just a self, being, who he or she or they is or are. Starting there. And expanding outward instead of shrinking inward. Becoming more, instead of becoming less.

Take up space in this world. Follow the nudges. Even when they’re scary or don’t make sense from a financial or rational or stability or security standpoint. From experience, I know, and moving forward I want to continue to hope that they somehow always take you to where you need to go.

Grace and peace friends.

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Cheers to the Journey, and May your Spirit always reside in a state of wonder.