I don’t know exactly who ‘they’ are but as far back as I can recall in hindsight, they’ve been slipping in through the cracks, windows, and doors of my life and gently, imperceptibly chipping away at my core self, my creativity, my capacity to give and receive love, and my general zest for life which some call joy, and I’ve unconsciously allowed it. Those BASTARDS!
Let me start at the beginning. No, not the beginning of time but the beginning of my story of this illustrious band of thieves. This is not MY life story. It’s a tale of humanity’s life story as told through a series of detours (from the perspective of my experiences), which could potentially illuminate the radical human makeover many of us are currently experiencing.
As a young child, I wanted to be something - a dancer, a doctor, an astronaut, an Airforce pilot. You name it, I dreamt about it. Each of us had dreams. It wasn’t until the pandemic and then when I began writing, on a whim really, that I realized how far I’ve detoured away from those dreams. If I weren’t a believer in a universal plan for my life, I would think I’d lost my sight, my mind, and my heart somewhere and began aimlessly wondering around busting shit up like a drunken sailor on shore leave. I mean what the hell? How did I get so far off course? Let’s backtrack over my route for clues.
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Start Here ==> Way Point 1 - Coping
Birth is the beginning of my story. It’s when I first screamed in protest of being pulled from my bubble to join my starting point - my family. Each of us is delivered into an environment over which we have no control and here’s where the detours begin. Sure we all progress through the most of the common human milestones - nursing, weaning, teething, crawling, walking, touching, learning. But our environment is the reality within which we develop (insert childhood memories here). The number one survival skill I developed during my formative years, and Way Point 1, was - coping. I very quickly learned to be quiet, be good (don’t break ANY rules), be a pleaser, be a peacemaker - anything to keep from triggering some shit to go down which ended in someone getting hurt. I also learned - appreciation. I learned to relish the quiet, miraculous, magical moments like seeing a salamander in the yard, lying in the grass staring at the sky, feeling powerful in my strong, healthy body. I learned that despite my erratic home environment, we all had access to food, fitness, and fun.
Way Point 2 - Adolescence
During pre-adolescence and throughout adolescence I was trained in two possibly competing camps. One was the dance of human sexuality and the other was the accumulation of skills required for the fittest to survive. I’ll never forget some of my firsts in both arenas. My first physically competitive arena, outside of backyard games, was the President’s Physical Fitness award. All six of the children in our family were highly competitive and took it as a personal challenge to win it every year. I was insanely strong, and also tough (see “coping” above). I was able to best many of the boys at my school and had in fact beaten up a few in my time there. At the same time, about 5th grade, the school dances and other such mini-dating nonsense was beginning. In this arena, femininity was prized. This was something I neither thought nor cared about. Still, it was part of that dance, so I was observant. I’ve never forgotten the first time someone I admired asked someone else to the dance. I confronted him to ask why. He told me “Oh, you’re a lot prettier than she is, but you have a bad personality.” LOL. See “coping” above. In our home, sisters and brother alike were raised tough as nails and my aggressive personality wasn’t the Disney stuff that school dance dates were apparently made of. Then it crushed me. Now I laugh and laugh. Seriously, what 5th grade boy uses those words? Then these camps converged into a new way point.
Way Point 3 - Sorting
I’m definitely NOT getting into biology here nor will I defend any scientific theories. Again, this is my experience. During adolescence a sorting process began. In and of itself it’s a detour that we mindlessly, unconsciously get swept up in. Smart, rude, mean, nice, good, bad, funny, popular, goth, etc. The list goes on and on, like sorting into tribes. High School is a veritable cattle chute of sorting. See “coping” above. Suddenly I began listening to this insidious voice that said - “Cheerleaders get more dates than athletes or band members.” and “Why don’t you have any best friends? Why aren’t you nicer?” and “Why don’t any boys like you?” Here is where I began shedding dreams like skin cells, into a million microscopic pieces all over my environment. Here is where my subconscious battle cry became “Get a college degree and get the hell out of here.” Instead of “I want to be an artist and worry about making a living when the time comes.” While we were looking around at this, during the rise of television I might add, we saw other groups that looked better. We began to strive for something that came from outside ourselves, not what was inside shouting in a still small voice “No, no. That’s not who you are.” Like the cattle in the chutes we were off to the auction for a valuation of our societal worth having utterly zed to do with our souls. Zero, zilch, nada. Another of the sorts occurring during this time was the government-derived education system in our nations, who proceeded to sort our next phase of life based on the obscenity of standardized testing - vocational, special, higher education. Really? Before we had any idea about who we were, they labeled us with “Grade A College Material” and shipped us off to market.
Way Point 4 - Work Prep
Out the chute above I emerged to pursue ‘higher’ education, where I learned even more about how to pass a test. Nothing about life or my soul or how to be a better person or how to achieve a dream, mind you. Only how to better pass a test. Passing was such an all-encompassing mantra that I changed my major several times trying to find something I enjoyed but could also pass a test in. LOL. I started in Industrial Engineering, moved to Undecided, toyed with Nutrition, then SETTLED on Finance. I don’t even remember much of college. It carried me along in the invisible stream of human productivity until I graduated and entered the ‘professional’ workforce. By then these detours began covering me in some kind of shell-like coating, burying the real me deeper and deeper under the layers like paint in an old home. While graduating with a Finance degree wasn’t oceans away from my dreams - using analytical skills was creative of sorts - it was chosen to 'get done and get a high paying job’, after all my starting salary of $24,500 seemed like millions of dollars to me at the time. Off I went to work - the single largest detour I’ve experienced in my almost 60 years on earth.
Way Point 5 - Work
Not just any work, but mostly corporate American work. Here I learned REALLY quickly to put on a uniform every day, both figuratively and literally. Before business casual dress codes became all the rage, my experience demonstrated that women dressed like men got ahead. Another layer of paint over my soul. I was neither comfortable enough nor professionally encouraged to wear dresses. Not only that, but there was a palpable environment of ‘sit down and wait your turn’ in the cubicle-land of the financial services firm where I worked. It was quite literally ‘who you knew’ because networking was the only way to get into the conversations where leaders were sorting those with ‘corporate potential’ from those without. When women wanted to move up, “sharp elbows” were discouraged. It wasn’t just corporations either. The ‘institution of higher learning’ where I currently work is no better. My first manager there, just 4 short years ago, told me “You need to be more motherly, like the department assistant.” I was in shock for a bit. Then I was hurt because my mom died when I was 9, so I had very few ‘motherly’ role models thank you very much. Then I was furious. Then I realized who cares?! By that point in my life I’d already begun an awakening to all that paint that was stifling me and my soul.
Here is where the detours change. After all, by now we know that we’re in charge of the GPS. Not ‘them’, whoever they might be.
Way Point 6 - Self-discovery
During the pandemic there was one catastrophic shock after another. In America, George Floyd forcibly and violently ripped the blinders off of anyone who might still be asleep at the wheel on this road trip we call life. I don’t care who you were then, you are someone else now. We all internalized that pivotal moment in our raw, carnal humanity. We personalized it. For me, I saw so much angst and hatred amongst humans, with no sane outlet. With no map back to the solid ground upon which they previously resided. I began to notice the humanity of strangers. I began to watch television, including some news, which up to that point I hadn’t. I began to wonder why humans were so callous, so focused on our differences instead of our similarities. Out of the blue, I also began to knit and crochet and create 24x7. I began to do yoga over video call with my sisters. I began to listen to my intuition and to question everything. I began to rediscover myself, the one I’d buried in the dried layers of paint picked up on all the detours above. I began to formulate the idea for a book. I won’t get into the details, but in the course of blossoming and returning to the journey that began with the birth of my soul into this plain, I had conversations with family members. One of them suggested I write some stuff on SubStack and build a following. Then I could write the book which my followers might appreciate. It seemed a brilliant idea. It seemed a new trip. It wasn’t, it was the next way point.
Way Point 7 - The Path Less Traveled
Somehow in the course of writing I uncovered the unrealized, untold stories that led me down the scariest path thus far. It appeared all dark, overgrown, and filled with traps and dead-ends and crevasses impossible to traverse. Appearances can be deceiving. On this less traveled path I’ve expanded, pushing the outer boundaries of my full potential so far away as to make it stratospheric, like a gas bound only by the unknown outer reaches of our universe. I have so many ideas. I have so much energy and such reach - when the stars are our targets our reach is infinite. It becomes the combined, synergistic reach of humanity - there are no boundaries. Somehow this path less traveled has led me back home to me, to my human potential where all the secrets of my universe and my deity and my soul reside. It’s such a Dorothy in Oz moment, this period of my life, that I wake up daily to a new person in the mirror. I can no more stop the inpouring of the new me than I can make the sun stop shining, creeps like Gates aside.
End Here ==>The Destination
The return to my soul was no less gradual than the detours of life I described above. Yes, I ran into the guardrails and swerved off the highway during the pandemic, but when I got back on the road I didn’t feel any different at first. I didn’t recognize that I was moving in another direction. Oh, don’t get me wrong, now I recognize that I’d lost my ever-loving mind for at least two years. It was all the raised eyebrows from the crowds around me that woke me to the changes. Although it took fewer years to find my way back to myself than it did to make life’s detours in the first place, it’s been no less life-altering. Looking back over the years, as us elders are wont to do, I understand the things that helped me break free and steal back my soul.
Looking (seeing) - Both outward and inward. The George Floyd’s of the world exploded the setting around my external reality. I began observing the world with very different eyes. Meditation, which I began a few years ago, exploded the setting inside me. While staring into my third eye, my soul stared back and not only that it began telling me about myself.
Listening (absorbing) - Following my intuition led me places that were not on the map I’d been using. By the time I intuited that it was a new map, I no longer had any fear of the dark, less traveled paths I would bravely traverse with no ending in view. Listening to others with my heart uncovered how much of my reality I’d painted over their story, which they’ve since had to shed . . . . and that cycle goes on and on. When I learned to absorb their story versus simply hearing their words through my filter, I was shocked that it was something of a horror story not the fairy tale I’d made up.
Feeling - See “coping” above. The layers of paint don’t only separate you from your soul, but they also encase your emotions. It’s not necessarily bad but it is protective. Adults don’t need protecting. We need to feel our feels all the way from our heads to our toes, at an atomic level. We must feel what’s happening. There is no other way to fully experience it. Did you know toddlers primarily learn through touch - touching the hot stove, thrusting their hands into mud, putting things in their mouth so their sense of taste gets into the game? Did you also know that kicking and screaming like toddlers is healthy. Sometimes life calls for it. Crying for three hours straight is cathartic. Sometimes life calls for it. Feeling an anger so commanding that it takes over our brains is revelatory. Sometimes life calls for it. Every emotion is part of the counter-balance to the peace, required to hear ourselves and understand where our soul is at any given moment. We use emotions to reorient ourselves to our magnetic north.
Physical Sharing IRL - UN PLUG! The matrix is a lie that lulls us into silence, compliance, comfort, carelessness. Step outside your digital life EVERY DAY to hold the hand of someone who is scared. To smile at a stranger who’s preoccupied. To share a story or listen to someone else’s. To recognize that the people and the reality in your immediate vicinity are not different from you in the alien way the matrix would have you believe. They are just people, like you, with kids and pets and worries and feelings too.
My hubby speaks frequently about how different I am now. How I’m softer, but also more emotional like a girl (insert evil laughter here), with all the mercurial moods of a goddess. I have in fact arrived at my destination. Not at the end, but at the beginning. I’m at the explosion of purpose that thrusts the butterfly from it’s chrysalis, driving it inexorably forward for the good of its species. Like the butterflies, our days are numbered. If anyone out there is reading this today, I hope you see a tale worthy of discovering the you inside of yourself. Without the inner work, you’ll never get to the end of the story you were sent here to tell.
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Butterfly Image Credit: NBC5 Chicago
So relatable! Thank you😊
Thanks for sharing your journey, Cori. Those thieves are great at distracting us from what is important in life! Haha, I too wanted to be an air force pilot, but then high school math hit me like a runaway train. Haha. Thinking back, I think I liked the idea of flying more than actually flying. Life is interesting though reflecting back on the twists and turns, mostly unplanned, that turned out to be way of an adventure.