I gave up doing what I love and my soul paid the price

I wrote my first poem when I was 8. As a child I could sing any song I heard on the radio, recognized any track from the first notes. It was clear “what I wanted to be when I grew up”. BUT…

When I was 22 years old I found myself working as an HR consultant in an office. Why?

Why did I give up not only on my dreams but also on myself? It took me decades to even dare to ask myself this question and eventually find the answer.

I kept wandering on many different paths, plunging in turbulent relationships, travelling the world and even spending years in an ashram immersed in deep spiritual self investigations.

But even after realizing who I am at a spiritual level and reaching the highest insights regarding my true divine nature, when it came to my actual functioning in this world I used to feel a bit lost and unfulfilled. And I could not truly understand why. Why???

On my 40th birthday the answer struck me as a lightening. It was humbling and raw to see that it had been with me all along and the key had never left my own pocket.

I saw that I had always hidden in “otherness” to avoid facing liability for my own life. I had numbed and distracted myself in toxic relationships in which I had placed “another” on the pedestal of my attention so that I wouldn’t have to face myself and the wound of not choosing and not committing to unapologetically walk my path.

At a deeper level I guess I can say that everything unfolded as it was supposed to. I had to go through certain experiences that served my spiritual growth and human emotional healing.

At a practical level though I could finally see how ignorance and immaturity had gotten the best of me. How competition paralyzed me. How every time I was shown I was not good enough in my singing, writing or any other craft I would just give up instead of understanding that mere talent was not sufficient and that any skill is a seed that needs to be cultivated and cared for. When what I wrote was not understood or appreciated I took it personally as a sign that writing was not for me and I forgot why I had started doing it in the first place.

One could say that I chose the easier way out, but It is not so. Paradoxically giving up was far more excruciating than choosing to push through fear and discomfort and to persevere in the direction of my dreams.

Every time I would see a new singer have their breakthrough or a writer become successful I felt unbearable pain. Not as mere trivial jealousy, but as a cry of my soul asking me: “Why have you amputated precious parts of me?” And instead of listening to that pain I kept distracting and numbing myself investing attention and precious time in anything else but what I truly felt called to do.

I don’t know if it was the urgency of noticing the time rushing by when I turned 40 that woke me up or if it was that I had finally reached the right level of maturity to truly take an honest look at myself. What I do know is that I found myself roaring: “Enough! It is now or never!!”

And thus an uncomfortable but essentially sweet process of reclaiming the lost pieces of my soul began. I left my job and took a leap into the unknown with no safety net. I did not know what money I would buy food with the next day. But I knew there was no more time left to waste.

Deciding to leave the survival rat race and monetize your talents and passions is terrifying, I know.

Because you are gambling on yourself and thus the stakes are the highest there can be. You need to embrace the confidence that what you can bring to the world is valuable and worth it. Not in a megalomaniac fashion, but with rawness and vulnerability, embracing who you are and putting it all in service to the great tapestry of existence.

And this was a difficult one for me. It still is.

Nevertheless, I now see clearly that even if I gave up on doing what I love and chose an apparently “steady income” from a “low risk” activity that I can do well only for survival’s sake, I would still have to work, sweat, face rejection and bad days, fall and get up again. But I would be laying bricks of my being to build a house where my soul would not feel at home.

So why not go through all these while walking a path that gives me joy, keeps me excited and allows me to lovingly share of the gifts I naturally carry within?

I don’t know about you, but for me no destination and sense of safety is worth paying the price of having to amputate even a tiny speck of my soul. Not anymore.

Let the wind blow. Let the snow fall. Let the storms and thunders roar. It is fine. I came back to myself. I am home.