Taking the (First) Plunge Into the Sea of the Unknown
“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.” -Theodore Roosevelt
I used to be an architect, a hoarder (still guilty of it but a lot less), and a hermit crab that hid under the shell of my fear telling myself and the world that I didn’t like putting myself in the spotlight because ‘ I don’t like it’ which is somewhat still true but in this of giving blogging a go scenario, it wasn’t the case. I didn’t start a blog not because I didn’t like it, but it was more because ‘ I was afraid to do it’. Do you see the very subtle difference?
My auto-pilot mind tricked me into believing that because there are too many people trying to do it (or were brave enough to), it’s not for me. At the time I was considering doing it in 2016 when there were already millions, if not billions, of blogs already active and could be found in the search engine.
For years, (6 years to be precise), I’ve spent time asking myself again and again, really why didn’t I like it? This must be coming from somewhere. I love writing, and I believe I’m quite good at it too (again, it took me years to reach this point where I can accept it) because I didn’t believe what my ego told me about the blogging aversion.
I began preparing myself for the right skills and most importantly; the right mindset to become free from the fear of putting myself and my work out there (unless you have started on your journey, you won’t be able to catch a glimpse of this terrifying feeling that comes with no being able to see ahead in the world of the uncertainty…)
I’m now 44, and I am lucky to say that my major work is to create a meaningful profession of living a life of impact and fulfillment. I work patiently and persistently, waiting quietly on the sideline for this work to shine. My daily outcome to the work I do is to steadily become this true and unique individual; a kind of person I would admire and respect.
We all have this freedom and responsibility to search for the meaning of our existence in this meaningless world. We can create our own purpose and values, living an intentional life through conscious choices, rather than being predetermined by an external force.
The transition doesn’t happen overnight but I know I’m taking a step toward it every day, and this beginning of letting myself be seen is one of the biggest, hardest, and took me the longest time to overcome and accomplish.
This is the main focus of this post, a brief summary of my journey on self-actualizing during the years I was approaching the midlife crisis. I will go into detail about each milestone in the following blogs but for now, here’s how it started.
🌟The first step where I began the process of individuation was leaving the known world; my world- the world as I knew it, and into the liminal space. This happened during the year I was turning forty, and the time was the longest, darkest, and cruelest.
It took me from when I was thirty-seven years old to the beginning of this year (2022), to seek direction, find my way, actualize, and practice living that knowledge.
This was another life training ground that got me thrown up and down, kicked in the gut, and suspended in the air looking down to my terrifying and painful death (if I lose the grip). It was scary not knowing who I was to become after I parted ways with my architect-self or where should I go from there. We, humans, tend to utilize jobs, children, and other responsibilities in life to hide from the hard fact that comes up sometimes in the silent moment of truth (if you’re lucky)-
“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.” ― Carl Gustav Jung
“Who am I? And what am I doing here in this life with these people at this time of the evolution of this planet Earth? Where exactly am I going from here? And what’s the point of all of this?”
I consider myself one of the luckiest for the ability to realize this at a very young age. Not my environment nor my heredity that got me to it, but it was my Individual Star.
I was looking for the meaning and answers to these questions all along, but throughout my entire adult life, joining the rat race and being at the top of the food chain was my safe answer. The same mundane race we’re all in together, the one we’ve been taught to survive in, and it’s the right way to live trapped inside.
To realize that and find the way out to something that’s meant to be our answer to the calling, to figure out who can you potentially become and not settle for less in this endless rat race. This is by all means not an easy job that also requires a long period of our lifetimes for just doing the hard work, otherwise, this world would have been a much better place where people interact lovingly with each other by being our true Self, not our wounded egos.
If someone would ask me now;
“Would you be prepared to spend six years of your life trying to learn to do something without any guarantee that you would succeed or even be any good at the end, would you still do it?” She pauses, “and if this is only just the starting of it. You would probably need another six more years in order to become an ____( fill in the space)____, or maybe ten years to become a successful one on that-would you still do it?
When I found myself back to where I was again almost thirty years ago when I started on the journey to find a home (the place I belonged, and that place was being an architect). And the answer is still the same…from all the honesty deep within my soul, it would be, “Hell, yeah! Come what may. I’m in!”
It was never a “Yea…maybe.” or “…should be good, no?”
You see the difference here?
This is the reason why I am proud of myself for even at this stage in life where most people would probably give in and just let life happen but I still have that enthusiastic drive to pursue my dream. It doesn’t sound naive at all.
I would say that in the first five years in this liminal space, I have spent most of my time and energy on overcoming my fears and developing a clear awareness of who I am, and can be. This is a big realization that took years to progressively attain, and it’s what makes up the purpose of the remaining years of my precious life. There are times in life I focused on surviving, but now it’s time to excel.
Unless you have experienced what Jung called ‘ Approaching the Unconscious’, where you basically look into your closet full of emotional and psychological stuff from the past and sort them out, you won’t be able to imagine how much hard work it requires you to sort them out, look at them in the eyes, throw out things that are no longer true or useful to who you are right now in this stage of life and keep (and maybe cultivating more of) the stuff that is useful and will benefit your growth and self-development are mostly hidden in your unconscious mind, the area of the mind where suppress our ‘stuff’, the area where the light of consciousness has not reached.
We don’t know ourselves as well as we think and often when we do, we struggled to accept the truth. — Dostoevsky.
It essentially is finding your direction in life; your true north. This will be different from others’ true north because we all have our unique stories of who we are and what our lives mean to us. So what does it mean to find yourself your own true north?
When you find your true north, you essentially discover your authentic self. It’s a combination of your purpose and your beliefs that are in sync with who you truly are and have become. You decide what you value most in life, what are your core beliefs, and what is meaningful to you and put that at the forefront of how you live your life. Once you’re aware of this innermost sense, you’re one step closer to answering your calling. Your true north is unique to you, only you.
This is a place where I share my experience, the information about that journey. This is all me, this is what me is made of. I would like to end this with a poem I wrote a while back.
Finding home.
Finding me.
Who is me?
Who am I?
Who do I long to meet?
I think it's Me *chai mai?
Finding home.
Finding Me.
Where is home?
That's where is Me.
It's the heart and the soul.
There, lies within Me is the whole.
* chai mai in Thai means, isn’t it?
