Breaking Free in Your Work
“To the voices that implore ‘You should be doing more’” *
If you're reading this note, chances are somewhere along the way, you’ve decided you want to have a different relationship with either, or both, yourself and your work in the world. You want to follow your inner wisdom and stop bowing to some external Book of Rules.
You might not yet be clear on everything, but you know you want to do things differently than how you’ve been taught to.
You want to dance, not march. Find pause and joy in your day, not mirthlessly shove one thing aside for another. You want to exalt, not extract. Celebrate not struggle. Respect your inner wisdom, not ravage it with intellect. Lift up rather than lean in. Rest and respond, not run and react.
So, why does it sometimes seem especially hard to do that with our work - with what we create and bring into the world?
One reason is that we've been indoctrinated since childhood, and sometimes even earlier, with the idea that you are what you do. In other words, one’s worthiness or intrinsic value is to be found in what they do. In their doing-ness.
And like me, you want to do good in this world. You want to bring art, beauty, inspiration, healing, tenderness to the planet and people longing for something different.
It's a short leap, then, for that desire to do good to become a measure of worthiness. And in a culture designed to demand and extract more as well as to lay the seeds of unworthiness in its consumers, the need to do more – and do better and more successfully - in your work is always there.
Plus, the hucksters preying on your desire to bring about change can confuse things. They are the ones who give lip service to smashing the patriarchy but serve up the same tired tropes – “I have the answers” “Buy them from me. Now!” – and who use the same tired tactics – manipulation through false urgency, the desire to belong, and the sheen of parasocial relationships.
It's easy to feel you need to respond, to do the same.
More—and then more, and more.
You can find yourself setting saccharine goals. Marching through your day. Unwittingly in a relentless search for a way to have at all - six figures, fame, Impact, and an Authentic Life.
What if you weren't meant to have it all or do it all or be it all? What if having, doing and being what you already have, do and are were enough?
In that enoughness, then, you would find not only peace, but abundance. The richness that only ever comes in the recognition that you already are all you ever need to be.
*Taylor Swift “Sweet Nothing” Midnights - Inspired by Laura McKowen’s idea to incorporate TS lyrics into her letters.