On Listening to Your Internal “Not This”
Project 365, Day 106/365
Happy Friday, FOAS. Today, I don’t have a 5 Quick Things for you. I wasn’t feeling my best today, missed work, and spent the majority of my day in bed, so I’m leaning on a post I started writing earlier this week that was saved as a draft. It’s not super robust, and I want to write more on this subject, but let’s just all pretend we have a busy Friday and are grateful for a short and sweet Arlyn Says post. Yup…that’s what I meant to happen all along. (As for the photo, it has literally nothing to do with what I wrote…just had to pick something so I could move on and I think it’s pretty ::smile::).
Okay, here goes:
In my group of friends, Charles is famous for a certain line: “Live your truth.” He won’t lay claim to the words, as he got them from someone else. I’m not entirely sure who, and if I ask him right now, he will ask me why, and I usually go rogue when I share about him because he’s very private. Sorry, shouldn’t have married a writer, Charles. (Kidding, I do respect him and his privacy and his comfort level on the things that I share. I know what his red flags are as well as his hard boundaries.)
Charles has long been the “professor” or the “philosopher” type, and when he lands on a concise nugget like that, he tries to impart the wisdom he plucked from the world to other people in hopes they find their peace and happiness.
But anyhow, back to “Live your truth” and the purpose of today’s post. Living one’s truth sounds so great, right? What’s better than going around life without the weight of other people’s expectations for you or the like. Except living your truth is HARD. OMG SO HARD, especially if you’re a people pleaser as I am. Some might argue that my “truth” is to please people, except I do that out of weakness and my complete and utter abhorrence for confrontation. I will inconvenience myself before I inconvenience someone else. My girl Glennon Doyle—(that sounded so casual…she’s obviously not my girl, though I swear if we could just meet, we’d be friends…so sayeth all the other millions of women who likely think things)—would slap me across the face and tell me to make it my mission in life to disappoint literally everyone else, including my own mother and father, before ignoring my own desires and needs. I know there is a lot of gray area there, but in essence, she’s not wrong.
But Charles’ second-hand “Live your truth” mantra came to mind when I stumbled upon the so-real-it-hurts-so-good Emily McDowell’s post from earlier this week. In it, she shared an image of the front of a card (she used to run a greeting card and stationery company by her namesake, FYI) from a series written by yet another favorite of mine, Elizabeth Gilbert. Reading it struck that gong inside my gut that goes off every time something speaks to my inner truth. Dang if it didn’t mess me up for a second:
We all have our “not this.” Maybe it’s a relationship in your life, maybe it’s your job or career, maybe it’s a circumstance you’re living through. Whatever it is, it’s so easy not to listen to your “not this.” Because acting on your “not this” is likely a very difficult thing to do. If it was easy, no one would have to write on the subject; cards wouldn’t need to be made to help us along. But we owe it to ourselves to do just that.
I myself have a “not this” that I’ve been grappling with for a bit of time. One day I may share more on it, in fact I often think of writing deeply on the subject, but I’m still in the “not this” so it’s not quite time to share. The “not this” doesn’t necessarily have to be some crazy life-changing “this.” To me, it’s the thing that’s been poking me and nagging me, telling me “nope, this isn’t it” and “uhh, not this either” and “oh you thought this was it? it’s not” for quite some time. It’s a quiet voice. It’s funny how the most powerful things we push back into ourselves tend to be whispers…that echo and echo. That’s when you know that until you stop, listen, surrender…it’ll keep saying “hey, psst, no ma’am, not this.”
So FOAS, today, if you’re living a “not this” moment or situation in your life, I hope that this post might just bring you one step closer to stopping, listening, surrendering. Live your truth. Answer your “not this” with bravery, even if fear is making you quake and you don’t know what’s waiting on the other side. Be brave, especially when it’s hard. You wouldn’t need bravery if it wasn’t scary.
And if you’ve stepped out of your “not this” and feel comfortable sharing even if vaguely, I’d love to hear your words of wisdom.
See you tomorrow, FOAS.