I’m reading a novel right now called The Winds of War and, while I haven’t figured out just yet what the “winds” part of the title means, it got me thinking about things that tend to blow into and out of life on a regular basis.

Sure, people blow into and out of your life all the time. The weather blows in and out with the seasons. The holidays come and go, as do birthdays and anniversaries. But there are other things that blow in and out, too, including one of my frequent companions: self-doubt.

We can probably all agree that self-doubt isn’t the only emotion that blows around. In fact, I’m experiencing a lot of those other emotions this morning along with my current bout of self-doubt: anxiety, fear, panic, etc. I continue to work to manage those transient feelings so that I don’t allow them to shake the essence of who I am, but some days are harder than others.

I’ve met people who seem to be endlessly confident. Have you? It seems like nothing can touch their sense of self and I sometimes wonder if it’s because they’ve worked tirelessly to nurture it, or if they were just born into an environment that shuttered the negative winds out and built their spirit up on a regular basis. 

(As an aside, I don’t know if any of us is confident all the time – even those who appear unshakeable. I think we can be confident in certain areas or while doing certain things, but I also think that self-doubt or fear or anxiety will still blow in from time to time when we step into an unfamiliar space.)

Since my childhood had gaping, war-like holes in the walls and was orchestrated by a person who mostly saw – and pointed out – my faults, I don’t think I got a good start. So how well I can nurture my self-confidence as I move through life is fully up to me.

I would say that as I’ve grown older I’ve expanded my sense of confidence quite a bit. I know this is true because when I was growing up the only area I ever felt confident in was my school work. And there were a couple of reasons for this that I can see with my hindsight goggles that perhaps will resonate with you as well.

The first was that my level of intelligence was something that could be measured and shown to me on a regular basis, so I could grasp it tightly within myself as truth. The second was that these measurements took place outside of my home and were given by someone other than my mother, which resulted in a different slant or weight in my life. 

And even though I’ve grown more confident in my appearance and in who I am as a person as I’ve aged, I’m still the most confident when I’m working in my day job. Not really a surprise, right? Because just like in my school days, my work in the corporate world can be measured rather objectively (ROI, KPIs) so I can hold it tightly as truth. 

When you lack the ability to feel confident on your own, hearing you’re good at something enough times will allow you to latch onto the idea and consider it as a possibility. 

Now here’s the paradox for me. One would think that this confidence about my day job – which is writing – would migrate over to my personal life and that I’d find some sense of calm about my personal writing projects. But it doesn’t. And why doesn’t it? 

Because I haven’t had this particular writing affirmed enough by other people, and unfortunately that’s the pattern my psyche has come to understand as truth. It’s rather sad when I think about it, but I'm working to get there by sheer force of determination.

​Maybe one day soon I’ll find my unshakeable sense of self while I’m alone in my own microcosm, writing the words that seem to come almost magically through an illuminated pathway through the sky. Maybe I’ll get to the point where I don’t need to offer my writing out for critique to believe that it’s good. 

​I think I'm getting closer.

There are a lot of mindfulness principles out there that talk about detaching from the outcome and about finding contentment or peace or joy within one’s self. And I think when those winds of self-doubt blow in, we can use those principles to remind ourselves that we’re good enough just because we exist. That whatever we strive to create or do is the result of the amazing energy that created our own existence, and therefore it is inherently good.

Putting my work into the world more often and more publicly these past six months has been both gratifying and scary. Luckily for me, I’ve gotten enough positive feedback to put fuel into my body and help me push through discomfort and fear. That feedback has also provided me with building blocks for my self-confidence, in a way. I envision those blocks stacked as a wall that I’m quietly constructing around myself, so that when the naysayers come along their voices will bounce off the exterior instead of piercing my heart.

A wall is inherently built to withstand winds, isn't it? Winds of self-doubt, winds of fear, winds of anxiety, winds of self-loathing (that happens, too). Keep building the self-confidence wall so that you can withstand the low points in life. The low points within yourself. 

A wall, once built, is hard to destroy when its construction is sound.
------
My first book, Halfway There: Lessons at Midlife, will be published in 2020. To be notified when it is available for purchase, sign up for my mailing list.

This is an excerpt from my new book, Halfway There: Lessons at Midlife. I hope you enjoy this sample! My book has been picked up by Warren Publishing and will be published in the spring of 2020. 
-----------------
Life Shows You Your Calling
​
Finding a calling or purpose (or in some circles “dharma”) is a struggle many of us wrestle with on a daily basis. It’s certainly been something I’ve actively fretted over for a large part of my adult life. 

I first knew there was a serious problem when I hit my junior year of college. I ran out of general education classes, hadn’t selected a major (and didn’t have any inclination toward one), so I took an entire semester of random courses simply to try to figure it out. I enrolled in art history, sociology, technical theatre, environmental science and a career planning class. These were all interesting, but “interesting” does not a major make. 

The career planning class was the one I put a lot of energy into, because it was supposed to help me find some sense of direction. I remember slogging through test after test to try to create labels for my personality and inclinations. We took the MAPP test, which was probably one of the most insightful, as well as a number of other personality and aptitude tests. Then we spent the remainder of our class time talking through the results and about different career paths. I remember feeling like I still had no sense of direction despite all of that chatter and analysis. In fact, I’ll never forget the day one of my tests said that my number one career path was as a mortician. I was horrified that something about my answers matched me up to a career working with the dead. Clearly these tests couldn’t tell me the things I really needed to know.

I ended up becoming an English major in the eleventh hour, and I had some very logical reasons for doing so that had nothing to do with hopes and dreams. First, I liked reading stories and learning about people. Second, I would much rather read stories than textbooks if I was going to have to do so for a few years. And third, my eleventh grade English teacher told me I was a strong writer, so I figured I’d go where my talent supposedly was. The decision felt right and I never regretted it, so for that moment in time I believed I was going in the right direction.

But when I graduated with my plain ole Bachelor of Arts in English, I found myself parked on a dark road that I thought I’d be driving down in the sunshine. I hadn’t planned to be a teacher so I didn’t get the certification. In fact, I hadn’t planned anything at all and was just hoping to be shown some sort of direction when I got there. After I walked across that stage and moved back home to Texas, I found myself with no concrete career plan as I was stepping timidly into my first years of true adulthood. Things were challenging for a long while.

I honestly never thought I would become a writer of any kind—not when I was growing up, not when I was an English major, and not even in those early years of my career when I was struggling to put food on the table and keep a roof over my head as a technical writer. I used to bemoan how much I disliked it, mostly because I was writing about computer software and that was the least important thing on my radar. But I look back with my hindsight goggles and I see that the universe had me there so that I could practice the craft. I would not have had the motivation to write anything on my own at that time in my life; I just had too many obligations and too much stress. So those jobs that I felt like were all wrong for me actually were helping me hone my skills. Something knew more than I did about what was to eventually come.

When I reached my late twenties and my life imploded, I expended enormous amounts of effort repeating those same career tests, thinking about what I was good at, trying to understand what kind of options I might have, and reaching for some sort of direction about where I was to go. I got divorced, I lost everything I had (including my home, twice), I had to rebuild a new life on my own with a future that no longer was written in the way I’d expected it to be. I even lost my technical writing job and couldn’t get another one. In fact, I couldn’t get a job as a copywriter either. So I assumed I was completely off course and needed to redirect myself. Clearly, I said to myself, I’d been lost all along or things would have turned out better. 

Sometimes life surprises you with your calling. Sometimes you fall into it even though you’ve been trying to avoid it, and sometimes you just don’t even see it coming at all. Maybe you’re fumbling around in the dark and a light appears in the distance, so you start walking in that direction just to get away from where you are.

While I stumbled around grasping at air, I wrote in my journals and in a blog—for what ended up being about nine years. I say that I wrote, but I more vomited onto the page anything and everything that was bothering me. I considered it something anyone might do to work through their crap—not something a writer might do—so I didn’t pay much attention to it. I find that people often ignore these small clues in their lives.

The first time I even recall thinking I might like to be a writer was when I started trying to pen the story of my first marriage. It was a sad, war-torn experience that went down in flames, but I thought it might make a good story (or at the very least get it out of my system). I never finished that book, or the next book, or the one after that. And this is because right about the time I was finally building momentum and thinking I was getting somewhere, I got sick. Really sick. Like, I almost didn’t exist anymore sick. I had a couple of surgeries and was down for the count for a few years. 

As you might imagine, being sick was like stomping the brakes on my life again—on my motivation, on everything. I did try to write another novel during that time in an effort to not waste my life any further, but I crashed and burned harder on that novel than on any before it. Clearly I was wasting my time. Clearly this was not meant to be. I then abandoned writing entirely for a year—a whole year—until one day, almost as if being pushed by something outside of me, I trudged back and sat down at my computer.

Maybe everything that happened needed to happen, just like maybe everything that’s happened in your life needed to happen. Maybe your “thing” will come when it’s time, like a river rushes down a mountain only when the spring comes to melt the snow. This is one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from being sick and almost signing off of planet earth—you’ve got to let things flow. Stop fighting, just ride along.

From the sum of my experiences came this book. And when I look at my life I can see that it’s been there all along but was waiting for the right time to emerge. I can’t write fiction very well because perhaps that’s not what I’m supposed to do (yet). I couldn’t write nonfiction very well because I’d told myself that it wasn’t “real” writing and therefore I didn’t consider it a valid purpose. In my mind my purpose had to be something real. It had to be something that was less silly than sitting here writing about my life.

But I’ve learned that we all have a purpose that may seem trivial to us, and that actually is not trivial at all. Some people would say that what I’m doing now is ridiculous. Who cares about my life and what I've learned? But then someone else might care. And a few people might care. And that means what I did meant something to the world because it meant something to some of the people in it.

It’s the same thing if you’re a cook on a line. Or maybe you’re a lawn guy, where you trudge in every day not understanding why your lot in life is to mow lawns. But you know what? Someone is happy to see that lawn looking beautiful. An elderly woman who cannot take care of her landscaping is thrilled to be helped by you. A single mother who was abandoned by her partner has one less thing to worry about because you took care of the lawn. You see what I mean?

Life will show you what you’re meant to do, you just have to pay attention and have some patience. My life has been training me for about four decades to do what I’m doing now. It’s been filling my head with experiences, wisdom, life. It’s been making sure my skills have stayed sharp by placing me in jobs that required me to write and to practice my craft, even when I hated the jobs and felt like I was squandering the days I was given. It then moved me into a life position, eventually, where I could sit down and do this thing I’m doing without the pressures I used to have on a daily basis. 

Give life credit and allow it to show you what you’re supposed to do. Flow along a little bit. See where the road takes you. When you get there, you’ll bop yourself on the head because it will all seem so stupidly obvious. But that’s okay. 

I think some people know what they want to do when they are ten years old and are prepared to do that thing. Others of us have a journey to take before we can do the thing we’re supposed to do, so we don’t understand it until later. If you don’t know what your purpose is yet, take heart. You are already living it. You are already on the journey you are supposed to take. Your purpose exists, whether you can see and verbalize it yet or not.
-----
To be notified when my book is available for purchase, sign up for my mailing list.

Last year I finished a biography of Audrey Hepburn and overall it was a delight. I've never been a huge fan of hers but I'd stumbled across an old interview on YouTube that ignited my curiosity.

She was near the end of her life and had granted Barbara Walters a rare conversation on camera, and something about her presence and her answers felt familiar. It was like we were the same person in some way or had lived something of the same life. I knew her. Or I knew how she felt. If she hadn't died in 1993 I might have thought maybe I was her if I'd existed here before.

So I ordered the book.

It turns out she was, in fact, just like me. She was a multifaceted human being with a range of emotions who loved animals, was rather easily bruised, and dreamed of having a garden. And also like me, her life was a constant grasping at happiness amidst a deluge of misfortunes, heartaches and childhood scars. I don't think she ever quite got there.

I was struck by something she was quoted as saying toward the end of the book. And this was that even at her age (60 years old), she still suffered from an extraordinary case of stage fright anytime she had to perform or make a speech. She also said that she was not alone in this nervousness and that every real artist she'd worked with seemed to have his or her own version of it.

Gary Cooper's hands used to sweat while he acted. Cary Grant worried himself sick over his performances.

It made me feel like my recurring feelings of doubt about my work, my non-linear overall progress, and my almost constant feelings of inadequacy aren't so abnormal after all. Maybe nerves are universal. Maybe they're just part of the deal if you want to strive for big goals in the game of life.

Last week I picked up my latest book manuscript and tried to continue writing. When I couldn't do that because it seemed like I didn't have anything else to say, I started editing it instead. Maybe, I thought, I'd simply reached the end.

I was plunking along and then quit in frustration. I wrote a blog post, then I think I cried a little bit, and then I pulled up my pants and started working on it again.

I know that I will fight many negative feelings as I continue on my journey as a writer, and I know that I will probably want to give up on my work again. In fact, I can almost predict that I'll throw my hands up in disgust and put my latest project away for another few months before gathering enough courage to come back to it. This seems to be my pattern.

But the knowledge that what I'm feeling isn't unique or odd is nice. The knowledge that others have felt the way I feel and have still gone on to success is enormously helpful.

Thanks, Audrey, for the lesson.
------
My first book, Halfway There: Lessons at Midlife, will be published in 2020. To be notified when it is available for purchase, sign up for my mailing list.