Following Your Heart: A User’s Guide
It is time. You wake up wishing you didn’t have to go in to work, you then begin to wish you didn’t have to wake up the next day. Mondays are the worst. You count the days until Saturday and then spend every hour of the weekend looking at the clock dreading the fact that time is running out — soon it will be Monday again. When you do drag yourself to work, you struggle to make yourself work. You procrastinate, use the pretext of reading about something to delay actually doing that thing — until you no longer can. When you complete the work, you realize you have done a mediocre job. But nobody else cares — which makes you think it is all pointless anyway.
Soon things get worse. You have unexplained headaches, you aren’t able to digest breakfast, you rush to the bathroom multiple times in the morning — anything to delay work. You wonder why all of this is happening. The answer is staring you in the face — you no longer enjoy what you are doing, you no longer find it meaningful, you no longer care, you are doing it for no reason other than the fact that you have always done it. But you don’t realize it right away. In fact, you don’t realize it for a long time.
You think this is normal — a case of too-much work or stress or wanting to take time off. You spend your time in the office looking at holiday destinations and planning vacations. You finally take that week (or two weeks off) to go on that trip you’ve so meticulously planned — and when you get there, you find yourself worrying about the day it’ll get over and when you have to return. You don’t enjoy it one bit. That cabin on the beach, the walk in the hills, the sunrise over the ancient ruins — it doesn’t seem half as attractive as you thought it would be. You read about why you are feeling this way. You try anything that seems like it might work — you download meditation apps, start mindfulness classes — all in the hope that it might make you function normally. This begins to rub off on other aspects of your life — you don’t feel like meeting people; you are irritable all day and fight with your partner who is struggling to understand what is happening and who only wants to be supportive. You no longer enjoy doing the things that you once did. You realise something is seriously wrong.
You go to a therapist. You tell her you are not able to focus on work — as if that is your only problem. But it is not. In fact, it is not even the real problem. You discover that you vividly remember parts of your childhood you thought you’d forgotten, or those which you thought you never remembered in the first place. You realize how much you miss the sibling who died when you were five; you miss the person you once were — who enjoyed writing — and gave it up. You admit (to yourself) how much you have struggled — with a society which forced you into being an over-achiever, which made you believe your worth derived from the grades you got, the schools you got admitted to, which made you feel on top of the world when you did well in over-competitive environments — which nurtured and promoted the insecurity this instilled in you. You begin to rediscover who you are, or who you were — and feel you no longer recognize the person you’ve become.
When you go to work next, you note the number of times you have conversations that mean nothing to you, the number of times you feign an interest in a project that you know is worthless, and the number of times you hear yourself speak and wonder who’s this person. You only want to be with the people you can be yourself with, the ones who know you and know what really matters to you — but you realize how few these people are. You still don’t think of giving up that job or that career which requires you to work 60 hours every week, which requires you to pretend all the time. Because you know nothing else.
You wake up crying one day and know that you can no longer go in to work. You take a few weeks or a month off. This time — you think about whether you can have a different career — and live the life you think might be meaningful. But you realize that you can no longer take decisions. Your education, which was designed to help you take decisions and provide frameworks for analysis is woefully inadequate. Because you are no longer deciding between similar options — you are no longer comparing pay checks, the time it will take you to get promoted, the length of your daily commute, the envy your new job will provoke — but comparing what you’ve always done with the possibility of work and a life that you may find fulfilling.
You find it remarkably easy to make a list of the things you’ll have to give up — the staying in fancy hotels on holidays, never having to look at a price tag, never having to think about that mortgage on the apartment you aren’t even living in, the medical bills you thought you could get reimbursed whenever you wanted.
And against this is the amorphous, intangible promise of living a life that you want to — the freedom to write, to become the person your childhood-self wanted to be, doing work that still excites you, being able to speak to people without putting on a mask, the tantalizing possibility of being happy (it will take you a long time to even acknowledge that you could be happy — not “not-low” or “not-depressed”, but happy). How do you weigh these options? Nothing that you’ve ever been taught offers a solution.
You get drawn to people who are living the lives they want to or doing the work that you think you want to. You begin to read poetry that seeks to inspire you to be yourself. You discover you didn’t really care about that resort you holidayed in last year only because your colleagues went there, you begin to think of options you didn’t know existed.
At any given time, what you know is less than what actually is. Therefore, it follows that the options you think you have, are lesser than the ones you actually have. But you don’t know this at first. You know it only when you actually summon the courage to quit that job. Maybe you never get to that point. But if you do, you realize that only the people you could be yourself with are the ones who understand you — your partner who is thrilled that you are smiling again and listening and present. You also realize who never might — the parents who can’t understand why you are giving up a job and a life they think is perfect, who worry about how this will sound to people; the colleagues who wonder why finding meaning at work ought to be so important.
You don’t know how this ends. Maybe it never does. Maybe you begin to lead the life you always wanted to and find fulfilment — but still wonder if what you gave up was worth it. Maybe you never think twice. Maybe you realize wanting to do something and being good at it are different things. And you go back to doing what you thought you’d never return to. But you don’t regret the path not taken, you don’t wonder if things could have been different, you don’t hate yourself for never having given yourself a chance. Maybe you discover that this feeling of having backed yourself means the world. Maybe you find that it is overrated. Maybe you think this was the smartest thing you ever did, maybe you wish that you’d never thought of it.
Who knows?
This could be a conventional article on the need to find meaning, weighing your options, doing what you believe in. It could have a few anecdotes on the people who have followed their heart and achieved great things. It could offer you ways to succeed at whatever it is that you want to do. It could reassure you that there is always a happy ending. Or there will be one if you work like there is no tomorrow, or if you are smart in the decisions you made, or if you market your strengths and camouflage your weaknesses. It could be a list — make a convincing resume, create a body of work that you can showcase, practice telling your story, network and build contacts. It could be a nice, coherent write-up with the promise of a happy ever-after. But do you want it to be?
© Abhishek Gupte 2019
