Standing on the Threshold:
I stand at the impasse of my life. A long dark subway tunnel, abandoned long ago. A pilgrim on an unknown journey, led only by faith, God, Creator, and trust in the worlds upon worlds being endlessly born within me, around me, and beyond me. Much to my dismay, this dreaded deep shadow is where the arrows point. A scary dark corridor to which I must willingly submit. Awake now, along my mid-life passage accompanied by not a clue of what is next.
What are my talents?
What am I to give to this world?
How can I serve?
Three words punctuate my wanderings – “I don’t know”.
What I do know is that I must keep walking, despite all inner resistance, deeper and deeper into the forest of the unknown.
I have been here before at this impasse, a wanderer in foreign psychic lands. Forced into submission by my own denial. Years of denial taking the form of a relentless, constant pursuit of success. An addiction to work, distraction, and a willful desire to become someone, anyone other than my authentic myself. I wanted so desperately to be seen. I wanted so desperately to know that I was enough. I wanted so desperately to belong.
To counterbalance this deep, existential longing I turn to eating, exercising, scrolling, planning, and my favorite drug of all, working. It is blindly, even comically, accepted to work oneself to death. This is a drug that is labeled, “good”, perhaps great. This is society’s drug that we taste early in life. To lavishly hand over every ounce of oneself to a corporate order and catchy vision statement is unequivocally celebrated. To offer up your soul for the good of the company is what we’ve all been convinced is the right thing to do, and how dare we ask any questions to the contrary. This is how we are indoctrinated to give and serve.
At the ripe age of 22, I was interning at one of the world’s largest consulting firms, ready to relinquish my youth to the militaristic marching orders of corporate utopia. I traded my earned freedom for a confined 9 to 5, a measly salary, and a closet full of bland business professional attire.
There would be no gallivanting off to Europe to drink cheap wine in the cobblestone alleyways of Mallorca. There would be no poetry, stories, or paints lining the walls and open spaces in my tiny studio apartment. There would be no deeply vulnerable conversations with colleagues about my heart felt longings. There would be no days spent in nature, belly to Earth, feeling the resonance of my one true Mother. There would be no adventure at all. Naively sojourning into corporate life, bereft of feeling and intuitive faculties, without any independent outer or inner exploration, would be my only fate.
I found myself birthed into a world of deduction, command, and ultimate control. In this world, thinking, intellectualizing, achieving, strategizing, and of course, winning, formed the lexicon of notable talents. I gave and gave and gave of myself. I forced myself to be something I was not. I so desperately wanted to be seen as good.
I learned how to develop and apply complicated strategy, deliver meticulously foot noted reports, and operate within finely tuned cultural parameters. I learned how to dress the part and how to control and contain the wildness of my creative self, reducing my expansive imagination into a this and that worldview. Black and white. Good and bad. Do this and you will get that. Be this and others will perceive you as that. I learned how to play the game and play it very well.
I became so accustomed to these models and modes of being that I forgot the spaces in between where the real magic lives. I forgot who I was. I forgot what I was laboring for. My work felt flat and soulless without the acknowledgement and presence of something mystical and enchanted that would enliven it. There was no vision or artistry; there was no pulse of life coursing through its veins. My work was dead and a part of me was dying with it.
The pursuit of containment resulted in carefully perfected language and polished keynote decks fit for a robot, not a soul. Afraid to be seen as bizarre or insane, I carefully traversed across the corporate waters with precision in action, word, and deed. My inner artist was relegated to the dark corners of my psyche as I carefully polished the persona of my work self. Beautiful on the outside, empty on the inside.
But no one can stay asleep forever.
At some point, the house of cards will unexpectedly be caught by a fierce gust of a wind or engulfed in a raging fire – a divorce, a diagnosis, an illness, a tragedy, a complete unraveling. Chaos ensues. Order is broken. All will seem lost.
The line between breakdown and breakthrough is as thin as a razor, and you cannot have one without the other. The perfectly crafted glass ceiling must shatter, and you must fall from grace into the next epoch of your one true life. However painful it may appear; this is for you. This is grist for the mill of your awakening.
I have fallen twice, once into the ER and once into the abysmal knowing that my life, particularly my work life, the one I so carefully crafted and worked toward, was never mine.
It became brutally clear that I had better start living for me. I was halfway to dead and there was no more fucking around.
It is a dark dystopian feeling to wake up in mid-life having lost total sense of who you are. Waking up at the edge of a threatening threshold to realize you have externalized your entire reality. Waking up to realize you have lost your soul. The grief is immense and beyond imagination. The tears I have shed could fill oceans.
Yet, it is precisely this craggy underworld terrain where transformation is ready to take place, where new life is ready to be born, where metaphoric death is both vehemently feared and profusely welcomed.
A change is imminent.
