I have only you, my deadly body, and yet white and red flowers I do not put on your forehead and in your hair, for your weak clay is too tight for my soul that I wear. Give me a body, you mountains, the seas, give me another body to vent my madness to the full! Wide earth, be my backbone, be the chest of this fierce heart, be my home to the storms that crush me, be the amphora of my stubborn ego! Through the cosmos hear my great footsteps and I would appear wild and free as I am, holy earth.*
Until yesterday I wanted to have everything, but today I want nothing.
Part 1. Intro
How many times have you said you’d start tomorrow? How many times have you said you won’t let yourself get hurt? How many times have you said you won’t hurt — by words, thoughts, actions? No, we’re not wrong, we’re not a failure, we haven’t let anyone down.
It’s human to be lost sometimes — in emotions, in feelings, inside ourselves.
Then why do we blame ourselves so much if it is human?
Part 2. Too much on our shoulders
Here is my (or our) story — a life lived with the fears, mistakes and discouraging words of others on our shoulders.
It all started for me when at home I felt appreciated when I brought home good grades, a patriarchal family where the mind beats the heart and we only express what we believe, not what we feel. So I reached a point where my value was determined by what I did. What happens when you drop everything and go your own way?
This is where the adventure really begins. What do you need? Courage, wisdom, people on your side, luck? A bit of everything, honestly. There’s a saying that if you look over the horizon and don’t see a mountain and you really want it to be there, God will be surprised at your boldness and create it. I guess that’s how life works too. We just have to ask, throw ourselves into the fight and everything will fall into place like the courage of our heart.
Part 3. My (our) story
As I was saying before, what does it mean to give up everything? Let’s take it one step at a time. I’ve always been a multitasker and a builder — from being in top 1% of my classes to creating local and national projects. To what use I don’t know, but that’s how I thought I would grow somehow. And so I built and built — a summer school, fundraising campaigns, businesses, internships of all kinds. All until a moment when a dear person asked me a pretty peculiar question — “what do you really want? What is the goal?” and I froze. As I get out of situations pretty well as a master of words, I started with some blah blah blah until I realized my “why” was absent, and my honesty towards myself and that person long buried.
I had been accepted to a top university in Paris, I was running a very dear company, I was involved in the Board of an NGO, I had a part-time job and a partner (yes, he’s a pretty keen beneficiary of my time too). I would cry from time to time as a joke, when in fact I cried too many times when I was home alone. I didn’t have a specific reason, I just think something inside of me wanted to unwind and since tears are sacred, it showed me that I don’t have such a lack.
Sometimes being an overachiever isn’t about living, it’s about existing.
But what would it be like to do just one thing and that half-heartedly? Many people have told me that they wish their kids were as active as I am, but that doesn’t really fit into the landscape where a parent walks into your room and says “you should get out more or watch more TV, you’re sitting with your nose in those books too much”. Then who should you believe, your parents or society that encourages you to do, do, do, not be?
Part 4. “What do you really want?”
In January I made the decision that I wanted to start another company, but this time with my partner. Sometimes decisions are not as easy as we imagine and the inevitable dawns as unexpectedly as we come into this life. My partner wanted to invest 60hrs a week in the new company while I could allocate around 10hrs, and that was on the run. After long and passionate discussions came the question I had been afraid of all my life: “What do you really want?”. Here it seems to me that my existence has come to an end and that I am either reborn or continue to live blindly in this life. “You have to choose, college or entrepreneurship. You tell me so often that entrepreneurship is your path, but it’s not your focus. Do you want college or entrepreneurship? You can’t do both plus the other stuff you do.”
What could I do? Everything has been brought to light and I could no longer hide or excuse myself. Hard to believe or not, it was the first time in my life when I didn’t run from my true calling and what my hearts really wants. Thus, by the end of January, I had already frozen my studies, no more part-time job, I was creating a strict discipline schedule with my partner and we moved from Paris to London to continue our business. I don’t know how it happened. I felt this strongly in my heart and decided to say “yes” where my heart says “yes” and my mind comes up with counter arguments from outside me, only from within me not.
Part 5. Don’t be quick at judging
It may sound like a fairytale and you can say that I was so lucky to be able to give up on everything and move to a new city, a new country, to start life from scratch. As not all things are as simple as they seem, it wasn’t so with me either. After a life lived in achievements and praise from all sides, giving up the things that brought me this value, my value faded too. I felt like I was worthless and that everyone was disappointed with the course of my life — all those people who put more value on the results they bring than on my happiness. I still feel from time to time as if my life has no meaning, as if everything is lost, as if I’m wrong at every step. I know this is where a wounded ego comes in, trying to get back to business as usual, to certainty, to making other people happy at the cost of my own life.
You can take care of people’s well-being without suffering.
Too many years have gone by where I thought results were what defined me that I forgot what I love to do, what it’s like to be alone sometimes, what it’s like to have a day off, what it’s like to have control over your schedule.
I finally stopped hitting a wall full of fears that never really existed.
Now time has a different flow, people seem different, the world seems different, I seem different. But this is my way, I’m happy. Why it took so long to make the decisions that make me truly joyful I don’t know. I just know that you need people to pick you up every time you fall, that you need time with yourself to see who you are, what you want to do and WHY you want to do what you do, that
sometimes taking a big step in life is an act of courage and not running away from responsibility.
You can’t jump a big hole from two small steps.
Part 6. You are not alone #strongertogether
Here we are, we who do big things and are happy. We feel lost at times, we feel like we don’t belong, we feel at the end of our rope. But we are still the ones who tomorrow will change the world for the better and us along with it.
What change have you made in your life that was made with your heart and not with the minds of others?
AM xx . . . P.S. I just created a Facebook group where we share opportunities, ideas, answers: https://www.facebook.com/groups/494000422341223 ❤
P.S.S. Remember:
*Give me a body, you mountains by Lucian Blaga, own translation from Romanian
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