Living Into Your Voice

I quit my job. 
I quit for many reasons I could go into, but will not because this isn’t a post for ranting about the disrespect and disinterest I experienced in my job. 
This is a post for ranting about other things.

I awoke from a hazy, disenchanted coma on New Year’s Eve, and the first thought, brazened with intuition, that pushed its way to the surface, was that I needed to quit my job. 
So I did. 
First New Year’s resolution: made, planned and executed — like a boss.

It was a little bit terrifying, if I’m honest, but it was singing with a freedom that exhilarated me. I felt like Kathleen Kelly from You’ve Got Mail, “marching into the unknown, armed with nothing”, except that I wasn’t forced into leaving a life I loved. I was compelled from a thing inside me that said, enough is enough. Get out and go find and fall in love with who you are!

I’ve never been a risk taker. I’ve always said I wasn’t afraid, but the truth is that I very much am. I’m pretty much scared of everything, but in a strange, noncommittal way that seems to come and go in different contexts, with different people, in different transitions of my life.

The past couple years, I have been afraid of what other people thought — of me, of my choices, of my voice. There was this fighting going on inside me — the half that was conditioned and groomed to please, to only be who I was sure I could be, and the half that reveled in the creation of my ownness, against practicality, against normality, against the path much traveled. Sometimes it became very crippling, trying to make sure I was in good standing with everyone, making sure everyone was comfortable. I was trying to shape myself into neutrality. And that just really wasn’t working.

When I tell people I quit my job, they ask where I’m working now, with an assuming tone of expectation. I don’t blame them. That is how things are done here. You don’t quit a job unless you have another job waiting. 
But I didn’t. And it made me feel a lot of things, but mostly just relieved.

What was waiting for me was time — to breathe, to create, to understand my soul, to discover a life I was elated to be living.

I’ve thought a lot about this and I think sometimes we forget that we’re made of the same stuff, you and I. 
Stardust and mystery. 
Our similarities are many — many more than our difference can claim. 
So filled with high-hanging hopes and fear thundering within our chests. We’re taught to stay the proven course and fear the shapeless dark.

Fear. It propels us into creating guidelines that have been purposefully and carefully dangled in front of our eyes since we were children. This, we say, this is what makes a good life. And so we study their maps and we recite their lines and sometimes we jump just a little too soon and sometimes our mouths are empty of words that they’ve crafted for us to use.

The expectations of our world are heavy. 
Look like this. 
Be like this. 
Do this. And then do this. 
Say this. 
Accept this.

And aren’t you so tired of it all?

We want to live the life that materializes when we close our eyes. We want to do things we believe in. We want to hold laughter in our lonely eyes and know what it feels like to share a heartbeat in the silent parts. Sometimes our lives will look like others. Sometimes they won’t. And that really is okay.

The beautiful thing is that we get to choose. We get to grow up in this wonderful world in the midst of all the watchful voices and we get to choose what to listen to. Our colors will look different. Our form may be a bit smudged. But our truth will be there, shimmering and electric, leading us on into the gray.

My throat has burned too long with words I never gave voice to. My soul rippling with dreams I never gave hope to.
And aren’t I so tired of it all.