Living Life My Way

The biggest challenge in my life has been trying to figure out how to live it my way – and it’s all mostly a mental game. I’m starting to get on top of certain things, but all I’m getting on top of is understanding my weaknesses (a huge advantage because it gives perspective) and I’m starting to see others’ weaknesses as well. We all want to be somebody or feel important and most of us spend our entire lives following the herd in every single way possible.

I also think we forget how to live our life with passion – because let’s be honest life can get really damn boring always trying to live up to some expectation or do some kind of path that people tell you you’re supposed to be on.

I’ve spent YEARS just trying to figure out how to get that passion back, and it hasn’t been easy because for one there’s a lot of noise you have to sift through to really get to your core feelings. Secondly I had the realization that I wasn’t doing my due part even if mentally I was trying to figure it out – I wasn’t working hard enough or actually taking the action necessary to live up to what I knew was my potential. 

It also hasn’t been easy because I’m not busy doing things other people are doing – I’m not on any regular path. I’m not changing jobs or going back to school to further challenge myself and many times I felt a sort of pressure to do that, just to relieve this feeling of “WTF am I doing?”.

But I realized that while I would benefit from those things, they’d also further distract me from that main thing I’ve been trying to do: learning how to carve out my own position in life first with the tools I have now and even believing that it’s possible – and learning from the journey of THAT.

I actually have great work ethic, I just didn’t know how or where to start, and so I’d often get stuck in the same rut of trying to strategize my future and not acting. I didn’t realize that it can’t always be about planning the course, like I’ve done the rest of my life with planning jobs, planning education, and so on. This path is primarily in the moment. It happens by paving it with action.

It’s difficult because it’s such a “murky” and unclear place to be. With the clear path school or climbing the corporate ladder gives you for example, it allows you to see the reward during it and at the end, for the most part. You may just not know how small or how big the reward will be at the end, but you see with certainty that it’s going somewhere. With this path, there will be a reward at the end too (all life experiences give rewards), but it’s really difficult or impossible at this point in time to really see where it’s leading.

There have been one million thought patterns and directions I could go in and interests I have, and it’s literally taken years to figure out that I think I finally understand how to execute and not just how to think.

I’m keeping this somewhat abstract because this feeling can apply to a lot of situations in life where we feel alone or are treading our own path despite pressure to do otherwise.

If you’re experiencing something similar or have in the past, hang in there ’cause you’re not alone, and don’t forget to work your butt off because if all else fails at least you will have really learned something.