En route to True North: Vol 1

How much of you is yours? Your thoughts, your principles, your character, your moral compass?

How much of it have you questioned? Your reason for friendships? Your ideas about life? Your timelines on when what should happen and why?

Who helped set up your Operating System. Did you ever challenge it? Did you confirm that it still applies? What is outdated? What needs to be serviced? What needs to change?

If you are like me, and you are doing the work, the very hard work of getting into the thick of it, you will find that there’s a lot of you that doesn’t belong to you. I’m finding that there’s a lot of me that doesn’t belong to me.

I’m on a mission to unearth my best self. My most authentic, most comfortable, most true self. My North Star, if you will. Not for any of the frivolous reasons but really for myself. When you’ve lived the majority of your life as a people pleaser. Always bending to something or someone for the sake of whatever, your joints start to ache & in some cases, they even break.

Safe to say, the girl is exhausted.

Growing up in a society like the one I grew up in, a lot of life is predetermined for you. There are hard and harsh expectations on your life that really do begin to define who you should be, and without ever questioning you could find yourself living for someone else.

Take ambition, for example, my personal fave. I used to have the ugliest relationship with ambition and achievement. It wasn’t for me. Oh no! Oh GOD no! It wasn’t about me, but I would spin it to be. I never delete anything on my socials because I like to look back on my life and see the full journey. There’s a portion of my feed that makes my heart muscles tight. Several portions of my feed do this actually, but in this particular region of posts, I see myself, enthralled in the euphoria of passing off as a very over buffed, over-polished version of myself. In those days I would cry myself to sleep but post things with captions like “ambition on fleek”. Surrounded by a sea of “impressive people”, feeling deeply underwhelmed and deeply unimpressed with myself. And so I faked it. And faked it. And I was able to live in the comfort that I was perpetuating a narrative that covered my insecurities. I doubt that it did. But imagine if I took the time, to ask myself WHY? Why was it necessary to be this incredible thing that I wasn’t? And why what I currently was wasn’t good enough.

I would have unearthed the deep-rooted unkindness towards myself, the crippling insecurities, the deep seething loneliness, the consuming thoughts of failure. At 23? At 24? I was a baby? So who set up these ideas that I had to be all the wonderful things today? Or never?

But God did his thing as He always does. Sent in a couple of scenarios to topple my house of cards. Brought everything that I used as a safety net to a screeching and raging halt. It all came crashing down. And without realising, I had to end my toxic relationship with ambition, after being dealt a few spoonfuls of humble pie.

I can proudly say that I no longer see my worth attached to what my hands can do or what my mind has created. They are now just nice to haves. Things that give me the means to live this life to the best of my ability. And the beauty of this particular situation is that I barely even knew I was doing to work when I was doing it. I just woke up one morning to find myself on the other side of my toxic relationship with ambition.

I’m trying to do the same with the rest of me though. Now that I’ve seen it happen in one area, I want to copy and paste it for a lot of other areas. My toxic relationship with my insecurities. My deep-rooted unkindness towards myself. My friendships. My relationship with criticism.

Like most of my write-ups, this one was prompted by a very very very good therapy session. One that will go down in the books. I really did turn a corner. And all I did was answer a question.

Who told you that you weren’t good enough and why did you believe them when they said it?

Answering this was equal parts heartbreaking and liberating. It was said to me by people that loved me but were probably too broken themselves to understand that it would do more damage than good. Liberating in the sense that with enlightenment I can see that they were just words that do not define me. They were very strong opinions that I can politely decline.

“I see your logic, but it doesn’t apply here”.

Sometimes you have to go back into yourself to find where you caged yourself and let yourself free.

I think I did that today.