I’ve said often that I’d like to go back to school someday. First it was to get my MBA. I decided in my head that if I wanted to truly be great at being a business person, having an MBA would definitely make me dope at it. I let the idea marinate for some time. I looked up great business schools, hung around Wharton’s Small Business Development Center with my business plan in hand, and essentially decided I liked the idea in my head better than in real life.
Like two or three years ago, I tripped over the notion again. This time I was dead set about getting my MS (or was it my MA, MFA?) in television management, plus my MBA. I actually went through the entire process with that one. I secured killer letters of recommendation. I wrote this kick ass purpose statement. I ordered my college transcripts and put every piece in place that needed placing and made sure it was awesome. There was only this one teeny tiny thing. Taking the GMAT. I researched classes and eventually began the online preparatory process. I took a practice test or several. Or started and then didn’t finish or whatever. I’ll admit, standardized tests and I have never gotten a long, but I figured if I gave it the good ole college try, it’d all be okay. Except that thing about my insides feeling like they were ripping out every time I looked at the letters G-M-A and T together. Really Envy? Your insides felt like they were ripping out? Yes. Believe, to feel anything like dread about something you say you want to do is not a correlation to a good sign. I have quite the breadth of experience with dread. I know from said experience, no good ever comes from it.
I couldn’t twerk my way around that feeling no matter how many affirmations I told myself or didn’t bother. It wasn’t the test that was the problem. I could have taken the test. I could have buckled my body down to do what was necessary, no matter what I was feeling about it. I’ve been faced with doing stuff I don’t like to do, but was necessary to get done, for a bigger picture I’m after– lots of times. I actually do it more often than I care to admit out loud. What I don’t ever feel when doing these things is dread. Annoyance maybe. That twinge of laziness that happens when you look at 13 piles of laundry that need to get laundered or zero clean undergarments will be forthcoming under jeans and sweats and such. Trepidation of the unknown has reared her ugly head a time or two. There are a few more, if I wanted to dig especially deep, but none that comes close to that feeling of “if I do this thing, a part of my soul will unhinge and fall out of my ear”. Dread.
Believe, to feel anything like dread about something you say you want to do is not a correlation to a good sign.
When all is said and done, the closer I got to actually making the inroads necessary to physically plant my tukkus in a chair that would correlate to facilitating what one would deem as “higher education”, the less the idea appealed to me. I mean. I guess it made sense that I should. Some of the dopest people I know have MAs and MFAs and MSs and MBAs and JDs and PhDs. Plus I like pontificating and postulating my points of view with scholarly types. I also thought I’d be introduced to a swanky upper echelon of potential date-able folk worthy of upleving my dating career as well. Win-Win. It seemed, also, my credibility, connections and income potential would go up exponentially should I have an MS (or was it an MA, MFA?) plus an MBA behind my name.
Meanwhile. What I learned about my guts is that they don’t lie. Once I cleaned them out a few good times, I was especially clear about this. Dread means I’m going in the exact wrong direction. Dread means, “uh, no chica, I know you did all this dope work toward it, but er, eh, your ‘North Star’ ain’t the way you think you want to head.” Oh pooh.
At the time, I was in the “Pray” phase of my “Eat, Pray, Love, LIVE” journey. I was just learning my legs in this walk and I was seriously confused about everything my life had become. I was afraid a lot. I was unsure a lot. I second guessed myself A LOT. There was still a part of me who wanted to be SEEN as valuable. Then there was part of me who couldn’t know my own true value if it had walked up to me on the street at gun point. My life was a battlefield most of the time because I was in a sort of purgatory of who I thought I was and who I thought the world should see. I wanted the world to SEE me as accomplished. Mostly because I felt like a failure. So I was persistently looking for logical ways to get to that end of accomplishment, meanwhile ignoring the condition behind that thinking. I didn’t understand at the time that if I didn’t work though and fix the underlying condition, I could have 92 different degrees and still feel like a bag of bricks when I opened my eyes.
There was still a part of me who wanted to be SEEN as valuable. Then there was part of me who couldn’t know my own true value if it had walked up to me on the street at gun point.
What my soul really wanted was the freedom to be exactly who I am at my core. My soul is so creative and so fun and so vibrant and so down for the adventure. My soul is a wild fire. It likes quirky things and music and art and circumstances that can’t be attached to any one genre. My soul is so vast and abundant, it can’t be subdued or contained with anything that would dare to box or define it. Believe, I didn’t come to this conclusion on purpose. I just got tired. At the time, I was depressed a lot. I’d wear a broad smile for the world, but my innards were constantly in a state of torture. When the rest of the world wasn’t around, I was melancholy. Mostly because I saw glimmers of who I truly am and what I truly wanted to do with my life, but I couldn’t wrap my brain around the “how”. I was pulling at straws to figure out how to get to where I truly wanted to be from where I was. The only tangible thing I could see in front of me was going back to school. My spirit told me no and I listened, but then I was left with the murky feeling of “now what?!”
After I sat in meditation on day, I’m guessing, and not really knowing what I was supposed to get out of it–truly– something in me leaned toward the idea of living my life like it’s an adventure. It sounds hokey and I’m sure it was, but nothing else was coming to mind. Seriously. I’m reminded of this because I’m fairly certain this insight came after reading Martha Beck’s book “Finding Your Own North Star”. In the book, she talks about the cycle of change. I won’t get too deep into this here but to paraphrase, there are four parts to the change cycle:
- Death and Rebirth– Crisis happens. Martha calls this a cataclysmic event. It rocks you to your core. A part of you, probably a big part of the life you once claimed, goes bye bye and you have to make a change. Your old life dies. It sucks very badly. You grieve this and then find a way to move forward.
- Dreaming and Scheming– This is the part where you start to get your groove back a bit. You dabble in stuff you always wanted to do. Maybe take a class. Probably cut your hair. Maybe date strange people because they seem interesting and then stop because you realize they’re just people, only stranger than you can hack. This phase is just about experiences. Literally throwing shit against the wall and see what sticks. It’s about testing what you think you know about yourself, only to find you’ve been living as everybody but yourself. It’s also about finding out what really sets your soul on fire. And doing only those things. Aka looking at life like an adventure. Then maybe put together a blueprint for how you can make the adventure your actual everyday life through your actual purpose on this planet.
- The Hero’s Saga– This is where the mettle meets the road. Quite literally. You know what you’re here to do, you have an idea of how you could do it and then you work your tail off to make it tangible. This phase is called the Hero’s Saga because like every hero you’ve ever heard about, the process isn’t cut and dry. AT. ALL. It’s trial and error. It’s stuff and whatnot. It’s trashing that blueprint and starting all over. It’s a whole bunch of everything that goes with building a life that makes sense FOR YOU. Despite what convention likes to tell us should make sense for any normal sensible person on the planet. Try saying that 10 times fast. Go on. Try it.
- The Promised Land–This is the phase that you recognize the seeds you planted actually bear fruit. This is reaping season. Finally! You can breathe! You made it! You can breathe and coast a bit! The life you’ve always wanted is here and in full effect mode! Holla! This is the phase that you literally work on smoothing out the kinks. Until another cataclysmic event sends you packing back to square one. Ahhhh. Change. The only constant on this planet. Allegedly.
My soul is so vast and abundant, it can’t be subdued or contained with anything that would dare to box or define it. Believe, I didn’t come to this conclusion on purpose. I just got tired.
Now. I bring this up for a very specific reason. Or, at least I thought I did. Wait. Oh. The change cycle happens for everybody. Clearly, it’s up to we as individuals to make hay out of each phase– provided we know where we are in the cycle, and as with any cycle, a cycle is a cipher. Plus we have to be open enough to learn from each cycle what we’re designed to learn from it, etc. I’m positive that didn’t make any sense because it was a bore to write. What I’m essentially saying is, while Martha Beck makes a great point that I used to help me figure out why I was so miserable about going back to school even though it made perfect sense to do at the time, the change cycle is only a very small part of our lives equation. Knowing is only half the battle. What we do with our knowing is where effective change happens. Dig me?
I’m a fan of tools that help to clear out the garbage in my way to my truth. Honestly, when the notion first hit me to view my life as an adventure, I was at my wit’s end. My intellect wanted practical solutions, but my spirit wanted to be unleashed. This idea of simply exploring life rang so loudly for me at the time because I was so stuck still with other people’s notion of what my life was supposed to be and pleasing them, I could barely hear my own voice in my own head. A really BIG part of me really loves to learn instinctively, which made my desire to go back to school make logical sense. Meanwhile, not being able to acknowledge what my DNA wanted to do with my life made everything weird, for lack of a better word. Fucked actually fits better. Contemplating the change cycle put things in perspective and gave me the freedom, if not the permission to simply BE. To have no expectations. To channel my inner sage and to surrender to a process I wasn’t familiar nor comfortable with. Mostly listening to essential self and what she wanted.
I remember fondly the day when I removed all the titles from my Facebook and Twitter profiles that detailed all the things I had been calling myself: blah, blah blah, blah blah blah, and blah blah. It doesn’t right matter what they were. I wouldn’t bother to remember if you begged me. I took out all the blahs that I once let define me and replaced them with Queen, Life Explorer. I felt like I exhaled that day. I’m already a wisp away from hardly having any body weight, but this day I felt no less than a thousand pounds lighter. People would ask me what “Life Explorer” meant exactly and I would say “duh”. Plus, I was a fan of the “International Woman of Mystery” attached to the whole idea. I wasn’t anybody, doing anything specific. I had no past or future. I was just ME. I could frame my life from that point anyway I saw fit. Plus, I did.
I’m already a wisp away from hardly having any body weight, but this day I felt no less than a thousand pounds lighter.
The trick here is I didn’t do anything spectacularly different. I was still writing. I was still studying through my spiritual process. I was still reading everything I could get my mitts on. I was still daydreaming about a media revolution and one day hosting my own free form talk show, big time like, plus the TV version. I was still making that talk show real in every one of my social media platforms. I was still daydreaming about this really cool, totally different kind of reality show in my head and making it true also through social media. Every now and again I would keep up with my once a week Blogtalk show that I never fully committed to. I daydreamed about world travel and the kind of show I would do that highlighted the greatness around the world. I called it “The Awesome List”. I made lists of all the things I always wanted to do: skydive, surf, rock climb, ride elephants, take a cross country road trip, sit on a couch in chat with Oprah, produce a one woman show, record a poetry album, swim with the dolphins, bungee jump, dive into a really tall Caribbean waterfall, own a horse farm, grow stuff, learn 5 languages fluently, take a French pastry class in France. You know, the basics. I mean, I just let the ideas ebb and flow until my life was so full of them I hadn’t anywhere to put them all. So I started doing Youtube videos.
There was a whole laundry list of things that happened throughout the course of the last 3 1/2 years that took me from A to now, but my point in saying all of this is that by removing the titles of my old life, I made room for possibilities I didn’t even know were possible for my actual life. I was free to not be anybody in particular, which opened up the understanding for me that I could be everything I wanted. I had to let go of everything I thought I had and everything I thought I was to be everything I was designed to be. So much easier said than done. And yet, it was.
The thing was, somewhere deep, I finally came to understand that the only way I was going to have the life of my life, I was going to have to let go of everything that refused to make sense. I became committed to authenticity. I became committed to coming to know ME. What I really like and love. What I really wanted no matter how impossible it seemed. I had to have the freedom to live in a world of my own design– A world that can only exist if I design it. That’s a hard pill to chew when you’re persistently told what’s supposed to be for you. I had to make peace with what I saw as failings. I had to make peace with every trial and recognize what they actually were. Building blocks. Every single one of my life experiences were designed to teach me something fundamental about myself. Lessons I continue to learn every day as my actual life continues to unfold.
The thing was, somewhere deep, I finally came to understand that the only way I was going to have the life of my life, I was going to have to let go of everything that refused to make sense.
At my core, I am a renegade. I’ve always been. I was told to fit because that’s what made my family and some friends most comfortable. But even when I “fit”, I never did. I was just this goop of people stuff making little sense to most people. While I had fits and starts of making a teeny bit of sense throughout my life, it wasn’t until I took on “Life Explorer” as my title that my goop of people stuff began to take tangible shape. Before I knew it I became a whole person with working legs. Then I got comfortable in my legs and my walk was vicious-like. From there I was a hop away from running with them Florence Griffith Joyner gams. Now I’m learning what to do with there here sexy, glossy black wings. My loves, it has been a process.
I remember with some amount of emphasis the process it took to change my social media titles from Life Explorer to what lives in the title sections of these spaces today: “STAR Queen. Life Curator. Idea Developer. Content Creator. Microphone Rocka @TheFNRadio. General of Envy’s Star Army”. There was no pomp and circumstance to it. Plus, it really was an evolutionary process. I got kind of used to being “The International Woman of Mystery” in my head and I didn’t right like the idea of being so clear about who I am and what I came to this planet to do. Not that you can actually fit all that into a Twitter handle anyway. Absolutely, There was a bit of blah, blah, blah involved in the process, to be clear. It started slowly. At first, I kept “Life Explorer” in the mix for nostalgia, I guess. Eventually, it faded into the ether because in my spirit it was a given. I AM a life explorer. As we all are. This life is the longest road trip we’ll ever take. Every day there’s something new and more fabulous to explore and learn and grow from.
Funny. Not long ago I recognized and acknowledged that I did actually go back to school. Through the course of the last 3 1/2 years in Eat, Pray, Love, LIVE University, I’ve learned and integrated so much into my very loud life, that I’m actually a student teacher at the Eat, Pray, Love stuff. I’m in my fourth year–LIVE– and it’s probably the hardest series of courses in my ageless life. I’m in this one class, Master Manifesting 102, and I might as well be sitting in Astrophysiollomanomanomolly class right now. I get it fundamentally. In theory it all makes perfect sense. I passed Manifesting 101, I think. The trick to any Life lesson is that you have to repeat it until you can live it. You can’t just talk about shit in Life classes. Life don’t give a care if you can spout out theories and pontificate theorems. Life only cares that its a part of you.
I AM a life explorer. As we all are. This life is the longest road trip we’ll ever take. Every day there’s something new and more fabulous to explore and learn and grow from.
Most days I look up at the ether chalkboard with my eyes glazed over in frustration because manifesting can be likened to doing a rain dance with your thinking. You hope it works, but all signs in regular people reality point to “good luck with that”. Meanwhile, I’ve got to get this. Because if I don’t, I can’t teach it. I have to teach it because it’s the part of my purpose I can’t fit in a social media headline. Plus, if I don’t pass this class, I don’t get into grad school. So.
Certainly, there won’t be any TANGIBLE fancy degrees behind my name that I can tout to folk about town as anything that makes me extra special impressive. Plus, Life class goes on for as long as we do. For those of us who are designed to teach it, the stakes are ever higher. If I don’t get this stuff, someone coming up after me won’t get it either. Womp. I’m glad though I’m not in this thing anymore to be impressive to other folk. Of course, if I had the inclination, I could brag that some day I’ll have my degree in La Chose Bien Faite. While I’d like it to mean “I’m a cross country driving, world traveling media revolutionary, who rides elephants and bungee jumps and skydives and surfs and swims with the dolphins and dives into Caribbean waterfalls and speaks five languages and grows stuff and lives on a horse farm, who happens to be the Queen of all media plus a French Pastry Chef who does YouTube videos.” It actually means a life well lived in French. Most folk don’t care about such things, but for me it’s what makes being a Life Explorer matter so much. It’s how I got my legs in this journey. I get to hand craft this life I live and it’s awesome. I mean gosh, did you think I did all this work for nothing?!
The moral of this story? I can’t call it. Just some food for thought. Thank you for reading this though. Peace and abundant “you can only teach what you live” blessings. Love, -e-