We are in this Together

Jodi Doidge
Jul 10, 2017 · 9 min read

Turning Pain into Purpose

I have felt like shit for what feels like a vast majority of my life.

I have had panic attacks, pain in my body, depression, anxiety, all sorts of stuff. It has only come to my attention in the past few years WHY I feel this way.

It is simple, really.

I haven’t been expressing myself!

Not really, not in a fully open and honest way. There have been moments when I have, and it’s been great! But then I get scared and stop. I have been holding back out of fear of what everyone in my life is going to think about me. I am afraid they will all think I’m crazy and all stop talking to me, at the same time and I will be alone, forever, with a bunch of cats, stuffing my face with whip cream.

AND I know this isn’t true, because I’m married to a guy who has seen ALL my crazy and still loves me, I have met people who have seen ALL my crazy and they still want to hang out. So I am going to share, because there is no right time, there is only the present moment and in this present moment I have the ability, the time, and the desire to do SOMETHING to help make this world a better place.

So what is it that I want to say?

What does a 33 year old Canadian female have to share that will make an impact on the world?

My life isn’t extraordinary, I am not famous, or important according to anyone considered important. I am just your run-of-the-mill, upper-middle-class, born-and-raised-in-British Columbia-girl. I have a husband, an older brother, a sister-in-law, a Mom (my Dad passed away ten years ago) and three nephews. I graduated with pretty decent grades in high school. I lived in a really nice neighbourhood in a nice house and had nice clothes and lots of friends and boyfriends. My first car was a beater, then I got a nicer car. I have worked and travelled and now live with my husband in Nashville, TN.

I am a singer/songwriter and I am training to become a coach for a purposeful existence.

AND I am extraordinary.

We ALL are.

Why? Well we are alive, for one. We are on this Earth, at this moment in time, for a reason. It took me a long time, well, 33 years to be exact, to figure out that if I’m not expressing myself, if I am not sharing my pain and how I overcame it, if I am not sharing my gifts, my creative expression, my joy, then I am doing a disservice to the world, and to myself.

So why blog?

Well, for one, it feels really good getting stuff up and out. And yeah, it feels a little redundant to start a blog when so many people are already doing it.

So what makes me different?

Well, because I am different!

I grew up in a specific set of circumstances that NO ONE ELSE on the planet has experienced, we all have!

Why should we only listen to one voice? One opinion?

Diversity exists because we NEED diversity.

What I went through might not resonate with your experience, but trust me on this: someone, somewhere on the planet is going to find what I write, or find my music and it is going to resonate with them. Maybe they are suffering through something similar that I have experienced and one day they might feel a nudge to go online and search “How do I deal with feeling like I’m not good enough” and they will be led to this post, or my music or something else completely different that will help them heal.

Here is the thing, people, we aren’t here by accident.

We are here because we wanted to be here, on this planet, at this time and place, with the family we have, in the body we have.

How do I know this? I don’t! And it doesn’t matter!

AND it is a great thing to believe in, because it TAKES OFF THE PRESSURE big time!

Because it means YOU ARE EXACTLY WHERE YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE.

So, we can stop the comparison, the blame, the judgment.

It is my assertion that we are spiritual beings having a human experience. As in, one energy, 7 billion human expressions of that energy.

Just one big, united, pure, loving ball of glowy, sparkling energy.

And we really really wanted to give the human experience a go to learn what it is like to experience pain, and suffering, and everything that comes along with life on Earth. We wanted this because we want to grow, as a soul. We want to learn all there is to learn through life, as many times as we can.

So we get to choose.

What kind of life do we want to experience in order to learn these lessons?

This is where it gets really fun. We get to choose our exact parents, where we are born, whether we are male or female, both or neither, what colour our skin is, where we go to school, who are friends and lovers are. All of it. We make soul contracts with other souls coming to Earth to meet up and help each other along the way.

We are all in this together!

And we have done it many times before, in many different lives!

Here is the catch though: we have no recollection of ANY of this when we are born.

No idea!

Except for one thing.

We have left ourselves clues. In our bodies. We call it intuition.

We get little nudges towards things, maybe a feeling in our body. Maybe through a dream. Maybe we hear a voice or the same song over and over or feel a familiarity around a person, place, or thing. Our likes, our dislikes, our natural abilities are all huge signs as to what we came to the planet to do!

And we have help too!

If we open up and tap into the source energy from whence we came, we can receive all sorts of guidance.

See, when we are born, we are assigned a team of guides made up of ancestors, Angels and other spiritual beings, like a spirit-squad. They are always there and they want to help us!

All we have to do is ask.

I ask for signs ALL the time, and the cool thing? I end up almost always receiving the signs I asked for.

**If you are curious, give it a try! An easy way to do it is simply sit somewhere quiet, maybe somewhere outside where you can feel connected to nature. Take a deep breath and say something like “Hey Spirit Guides, so I was wondering if you could give me sign that you are with me, could you please show me (insert sign here) Thank you!”. In the past I have asked to see things like an owl, or a sunflower or hear a specific song. Then leave it be, forget it, move on with your life and it will show up when you least except, and if it doesn’t? Do it again! There is no right or wrong here, do whatever you feel comfortable with, maybe write a letter to your guides asking for help, then tuck that letter away for a couple weeks and read it back to yourself and see if any of the signs you asked for showed up. Have fun with it!**

So we have our intuition, we have great big goals and dreams we want to achieve. Except we are born into a life that maybe doesn’t support these goals and dreams.

In fact, most of the things we wish we were doing scare the crap out of us!

We fear failure, we fear judgement from other people, we fear not making enough money, we fear not fitting in, we fear not being loved.

It is a challenge, and beyond that challenge is where growth lies.

Acknowledge the fear and do it anyway. It really is simple, and it is the hardest thing we will ever do.

It’s funny because we think that only certain people are allowed to be successful.

Who says?

Anyone who is considered influential, famous, or what have you, are the exact same as anybody else.

The only difference? They took action!

They saw opportunities and jumped on them. They said “no” to the status quo and choose to do something that brought them joy.

But they had better, and more, opportunities than me, you might be saying.

It might look that way, for sure, and focusing on what you LACK is a surefire way to keep yourself stuck in a continuous loop of never having enough.

We can do anything we want! There are unlimited resources on this planet if you just look for them, if you ask questions, if you research, if you speak up.

It is scary, and it works. If you never ask, you’ll never know (it’s funny how right my Mom has been all these years!).

And if someone says no to you? Well, that right there is a huge gift! You can ask them why they said no, ask them what it is about your request that doesn’t work for them, ask them if they know anyone else willing to help.

Trust me, there are people willing to help, you just have to keep looking, and if you do, you will find them.

When we act in alignment with our joy, the Universe will conspire to make it happen.

I spent my entire life being afraid of expressing myself. I am an artist, I am emotionally sensitive, I have been afraid of life since before I was born. I was adopted, so in the womb I was most likely terrified of what was going to happen when I came out because my birth mother was probably going through a lot of stress and anxiety over keeping me or not. I was taken away from her, unable to bond, put into loving, albeit strange arms for a month with a foster couple before my Mom and Dad adopted me.

Talk about stress!

As a baby I couldn’t manage these emotions, so they were absorbed by my little baby body for survival. That stress and anxiety, fear of abandonment etc. is now stored in my DNA.

I continuously react very drastically to seemingly small things. I’m in constant fight or flight. I have had to learn, how to NOT go into flight or fight all the time, how to be gentle with myself and ride out the constant waves of emotion. This means giving myself huge amounts of self care. It means feeling the fear and doing it anyway.

Growing up, I wanted to play music and dance and create. My Dad wanted me to live in the “real” world, which meant getting a secure job, quitting music and dance and focusing on the things he felt were important.

Basically, I wasn’t good enough just being myself. And I don’t blame him, not at all (well at the time, yeah I was sure upset). I have come to understand that he was just doing the best he could with the knowledge and awareness that he had at the time.

That is all anyone is ever doing.

When he passed away, I spoke with an intuitive healer and medium who was able to communicate with my Dad and I learned so many things about his wishes for me. I talk to him all the time now. I know he is always there working on my behalf to make sure my dreams come true.

We are learning as a society that living our lives for others is not what we are here for.

I have learned that all I need to do in this life is BE MYSELF and share who I am in whatever way brings me joy!

I am pure LOVE. My joy spreads love to others, we are all familiar with the ripple effect.

So am I going to share love or hate? What kind of world do I want to create?

And it doesn’t matter if people disagree or not with me.

Because it has been my experience that if I play a concert, it is guaranteed that SOMEONE in the audience will identify with me, someone will feel my passion through my music, someone will be moved. And that to me is a success.

I could stay at home and make a million excuses as to why I shouldn’t be out there singing or sharing my story. I could stay home and cry and blame myself and hate on myself.

Is that fun though? No, it feels awful!

And the only remedy is to FOLLOW THE JOY.

It makes me HAPPY when I sing, it makes me HAPPY to talk about purpose and discuss with people how we can make life on this planet amazing and free from prejudice and pain.

I walk around every day with so much conviction that if I don’t do something it literally hurts my body because that creative energy is stagnant and wants to get out!

So here I am, sharing, and I will continue to share!

My ideas might sound crazy to you or they might make perfect sense.

Either way, I love you, because you are me and I am you and we are in this together. ❤

Jodi Doidge

Written by

Canadian Pop/Folk Singer/Songwriter in Nashville TN * Coach-in-training for a Purposeful Existence

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