Wide Awake at 2am

I’m in this state of mind where I just don’t want to sleep. I’m loving everything that I am doing, and finally do I feel like I am walking in my purpose.

I think about what it took to get me to this point. It feels like thinking about someone else’s life. And that my new one is like caring for a baby. A baby that is given the proper means to thrive creatively, spiritually, and mentally.

The arrival of this mental state took such adversity that now that I am out of it, it somehow feels worth the exchange. It genuinely feels like pushing out a baby. The developing of your mind as a child, your character, and personality is so beautiful. I adore my childhood. I am grateful for my parents. But there were also seasons when life truly challenged my ability to remain resilient. To be transformed. And be challenged by the misunderstanding of living in my truth.

I won’t go into detail about what those challenges were. Maybe at some point I will. But I will say that the pressure I was put under led to me withdrawing from my own self-discovery and retracting back into conformity. My emotions were subject to it and so were my decisions.

I consistently drew back to what my true passions were but they were only fantasies. Something to escape my current reality but never was I actually walking into alignment with those possibilities. Only now, in the beginning stages, could I say that I am. And this is where the baby begins to be born. The life that I am cultivating and transgressing beyond what I have already been taught, is me walking within the phrase “you are in the driver’s seat”. And in that I am learning what it truly means to embody your gifts.

I recently just discovered what those gifts actually are and currently I am learning just how necessary it is to protect them.

The world likes to pretend it knows you. The people who love you can sometimes even push their perceptions onto you as well. So, it becomes very easy to subscribe to a standard way of living. Of growing up into what you were taught and how you were raised. You almost forget who you genuinely are. The person you were at your most curious state. The inner child in you that actually enjoyed the morning.

It’s amazing how easily tainted a life can become due to the normalcy of social pressures. It’s a genuine peer pressure of seeking community by becoming relatable and predictable in the eyes of others. Otherwise you may repel them by being an outlier that could trigger an unconscious emotion or thought bringing friction into the relationship. And to avoid this, we reside within the social boundaries that conformity brings.

And I wonder if this is how we slowly lose ourselves—not through one dramatic decision, but through hundreds of small decisions to remain understandable, acceptable, and predictable to everyone around us. Perhaps the arrival of ourselves is less about becoming someone new and more about shedding everything that has taught us to dismiss who we already were. Maybe this is what spiritual teachers mean when they say, “I can’t teach you what you already know.” Perhaps there is something within us that has always known, quietly waiting for us to become still enough to hear it.