What Nobody Told Me About Forging My Own Path In Life
Sometimes finding yourself comes with a great deal of mourning. #MayIWrite — Day 1
For as long as I can remember I have been sure about precisely one thing: I wanted to be a mum. Literally from the time I was a toddler this was my conscious truth. There have been other very true things, such as my relationship with the arts, but in terms of my internal compass, being a mother was true North.
My family has a unanimous history of having children young. The fact that I just squeaked past my 24th birthday when my first child was born put me a few years ahead in age of all the women who came before me. Still, I was young enough that I didn’t have much living under my belt and I was unknowingly very compelled by the standard social script.
Something I have spent a great deal of time trying to instill in my children is the understanding that we are constantly exposed to these very specific yet often invisible instruction manuals about how to find a sense of purpose in life. Some of that messaging comes from the world around us and in other ways we are called-to by the songs within our bodies which have been composed and rehearsed over millennia through evolution: We seek community, we seek love, we seek belonging. I want my children to learn the truth of these stories early so that they have a better chance of finding their feet on an authentic path from the start. I have learned from experience how painful it is to mourn the life I spent so many years trying to find, even though the path ahead is where my authenticity resides.
“Well, we all make mistakes, dear, so just put it behind you. We should regret our mistakes and learn from them, but never carry them forward into the future with us.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea
The first decade and a half of my official adulthood was riddled with iterations of the same lesson — trying to fit a square peg through a round hole, or trying to find a circumstance where I could squeeze my life into this idea we’re all given of the ladder to personal happiness. If I was making a family with another adult human and following a particular pathway of success, I believed I would be validated by the world around me. I tried in earnest twice. Then after abuse and toxicity and heartache I realised I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t squeeze myself, my children, into this one-size-fits-all form of a life and do anything but suffer.
The freedom was significant at first. It felt like anything was possible. As I walked along this pathway though, I began to feel an unexpected ache over my life. It dressed as insecurity at first, and then failure. Over time I realised that in fact I was in mourning for the life I thought I was supposed to have — the one I had invested myself in believing I wanted.
“Someday you’re gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You’ll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing…”
― Elizabeth Gilbert
Recognising that I was in mourning was a huge step. I recall asking my mother whether she came to a point where she realised that she was never going to have “that life”. I shed my tears — heavy, aching tears from my heart — and let the sense of loss wash over me as often as it needed to. Over weeks I began to really see how constrained my ideas about living had been. It felt like suddenly becoming aware of a metal corset I’d been wearing under my clothes all this time, and which I now had the power to remove.
Those first breaths without it came gently. It was so new. I felt so exposed without the structure pressing in to the edges of my life, telling me what to reach for.
This process still shines with that bright, crisp green of a newly unfurled leaf. I’m still acquainting myself with the spacious feeling around me and still learning to trust that this freedom really is mine. It’s exciting and so ripe with potential.
I talk with my children about all of this. Our lives move so quickly and if there is one thing I want them to learn directly from my mistakes, it’s to keep their feet solidly on their own path. The world will tell them exactly how they should try to find fulfillment and I hope they know when to tune out that noise and look inward to their truth.
Nobody told me that forging my own path in this life would take me through mourning the loss of the story we’re all told, because we don’t talk about the story nearly enough. There are as many ways to walk through life as there are people who are living on this earth. Each spark in each soul is looking for something of its own. How can we possibly decide for anyone else what that is supposed to look like; what form it ought to take? It’s exciting and scary to face the vastness of the unknown and to follow what feels most honest, trusting that I will find my way — one day at a time, one flutter at a time, and thankful always for the compass in my heart that guides me.
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