Maybe You're Shy Like Me
And Waiting for a Moment of Serendipity
I don’t write about this often and talking about it even to a therapist sparks my anxiety. When I talk about the entrepreneurial journey and the unexpected emotions that come up, loneliness is at the top of the list.
Often the conversation is about how we don’t find people who resonate with us, and the context is tied to community and feeling alone to make decisions at 3 in the morning.
When you hide behind the veil of entrepreneurship to distract yourself from living life, loneliness takes on a different form.
It’s deeper than not having peeps to share your vision with. It becomes a bottomless pit of feeling like you’re living a life of solitude without the connection that comes with passion, desire, and love.
Maybe it’s different for me. Entrepreneurship allowed me to explore a world where I could call the shots in my professional life. Sure, I’d go back to a 9-5 desk job, but I always knew they were temporary stopovers while I figured out how to make my shit work.
Entrepreneurship gave me purpose because I finally saw the possibilities. I envision a life where I can be successful on my own terms, even though the pace at which I would do it took longer than I would ever have imagined.
In the pursuit of success, I neglected happiness.
Not because I thought success = happiness but because I never believed I was entitled to feeling anything other than guilt and shame.
Entrepreneurship gave me a vehicle to drive my life into a perpetual limbo state, and the more I heal, the more I realize how unsustainable my hustle has become.
In the past few years, I’ve healed quite a bit, and while I still have more to unlock within myself, I’ve become agitated with the version of me that sacrificed so much of my life in the hopes that waiting to feel happy meant staying hidden and alone.
It’s the same inner demon that convinced me to believe in a child-free future until it was time to get a hysterectomy.
I’m still processing that decision and feel like it will take some time, and probably some drugs, to understand the weight of that choice fully. It puts living a lonely life in a different perspective.
I’ve realized that I am alone by choice and that trauma tipped the scales so that I could convince myself these decisions were in service to my greater purpose.
Now I know it’s not, and I’m wondering how many of my lifestyle choices resulted from assuming I knew what I wanted for myself.
Healing is a bitch. I don’t know if it’s the cycle everyone goes through, but pain, grief, and anger are so interwoven for me that they feel the same.
I had a dream last night that I was in Mexico City for a film screening, and I was having an asthma attack. Not a fun way to wake up, but it’s pretty symbolic of how I’ve been feeling over the past few months.
My unconscious self is trying to tell me that I am suffocating inside, and numbing myself with escapism keeps me from exorcising those demons.
I created my anchor word for 2023.
Legacy was my word for 2022, and the irony is not lost on me. I kept pulling up the Devil card in my readings ALL fucking year, and I knew that I was going to live with whatever inner demons I chose to keep.
Maybe the lesson is that I need to decide if my inner demons are my legacy because if not, I need to do something else.
For 2023, my anchor is LIVE, but as an acronym: LEAD, INITIATE, VOCALIZE, EARN.
Because in the shadows of waiting for my life to begin, I’m writing the chapters of my life as if they were already ending, and that’s not how I want to experience life…anymore.