Putting in the time and effort to work on yourself isn’t a process you do overnight, but putting in the work on yourself only adds to your value. And you know what? Your value comes from being you. Your value is in your existence. You are unique. You will never be born into this vehicle again. This journey is a one-time experience. Your value doesn’t come from your job, or what you can achieve, or how much success you have. Those things are nice to have, but you come first. Otherwise, what’s the point? We’re all going to leave this world eventually. You want to spend it trying to please someone else while you live in misery?
Life doesn’t have to be full of pain and suffering for you to accomplish something great, or to find meaning in your day job. For some reason, must of us run around thinking great achievements require great sacrifices. That simply isn’t true. I don’t know where this notion that success requires sacrifice comes from, but I do know that one of the most fundamental motivating factors in our lives as human beings is survival. What do you need to support your family, to keep your apartment, to keep food on the table? What does it take to survive? How much are you willing to give up to “survive”? Does survival mean saying “yes” when your boss asks you to violate your own boundaries? Do you have any boundaries to begin with? What even are boundaries? I had no idea and I certainly didn’t have any.
It didn’t occur to me that I could say no when my crazy bosses demanded I wake up every three hours to write an emergency brief in tandem with them, when they forbade me from sleeping, when they suggested cooking my own dinner was too much time away from my desk, when seeing my family became a problem. Was that job worth giving up my independence and my sovereignty? Was it worth my life? Without hesitation, the answer will always and forever more be “no.”
Living for someone else because you’re afraid you’ll lose your job is a fear-based approach to life. Fear is an instinctual response to threats to our survival. Are your crazy boss’s demands really a threat to your survival? No, it’s most likely not a life-or-death situation if you tell your boss you’re going to go to bed at 11 pm and then get up and make breakfast at 7 am. Your boss might not like any of that, but is your boss worth soaking in a panic-bath every day?
Acting out of fear makes it almost impossible to respond rationally or logically. How could you? Fear breeds anxiety and worry and it consumes your entire mind. All those “what if” questions are now behind the wheel of the car, driving you towards a cliff you didn’t see because you’re so focused on whether there are other cliffs that might jump out and get you. Forget the “what if” questions, that situation hasn’t happened yet, and it may never happen. Why waste your energy on something you have no control over and hasn’t come to pass yet? Even if it does happen, it might not be as big a deal as you think it will be, or it might even be a good thing!
Living in a constant state of panic breeds a decision-making process designed to head off events you think will be “bad.” Not only does that create a toxic environment, but it’s also a fool’s errand. The hard part is learning to let go of the fear and allowing yourself to make decisions from a different place. I lived in absolute terror at my big-law job, every moment of every day, for five months. Even before that, most of my life decisions were motivated by fear and anxiety. I was living in a prison of my own making. After many years of feeling trapped, I finally realized I didn’t want to spend my life being unhappy. One of the first things I had to grapple with was acceptance, of so many things I had blindly tried to deny or ignore. One of the hardest things to accept was that I have no control over most things in life. That’s a fundamental shift in one’s outlook on the world. Changing the way you think about yourself and your relationship with the world around you is a difficult process. One doesn’t simply declare, “I think I’ll change the entire foundation of my being today.” Acceptance is a constant practice. I would take it one step at a time, the first step being to accept where you are in your life.
When everything in my life unraveled, it gave me the chance to rethink what I wanted out of my time on this earth. It also gave me the opportunity to start making decisions from a positive place, instead of fear. Positive decision-making is what characterized the choices I made in Norway when unexpected events occurred. You can’t control the events, but you can control how you respond to them. It took me a year and a half to appreciate that simple truth, and I wouldn’t be where I am now if it weren’t for life blowing up in my face. Sometimes, the only way to embrace a monumental change in the fabric of your existence is for the universe to burn your house down to the ground. In hindsight, I was overdue for an uncontrolled brush fire.
“Emily, this is all fascinating, and we’ve gone from maudlin to morbidly funny and back again. Are you going to get to anything REMOTELY related to your Norway trip?”
“Thanks for your question, I.d., I would be glad to answer that with a transition into the Norway part of my blog. All this background is relevant to each and every adventure I had in Norway. All the lessons I’ve learned, all the change I’ve processed, everything I’m still working on, it all happens in Norway. Like a tagline for Disney, or Vegas, or a Norwegian cruise line (except for Hurtigruten, because that’s where it DIDN’T happen—stay tuned for the Lofoten blog entry). Norway was the universe’s gift to me, to show me how far I’ve come, to show me what I am truly capable of, to help me find what makes my heart happy. Norway showed me how beautiful life can be when you accept who you are, where you are and the choices you can make when you’re not living in fear. But you can’t just skip ahead to the fun parts of my adventures. You have to read the difficult parts to understand where I was coming from, and why I chose to see surprising situations as exciting adventures instead of calamitous breakdowns.
For many years now, my compass has been broken. I’ve spent the last few years just locating the scattered pieces. I’m working on putting it back together now, and Norway accelerated that process. I don’t know what direction my compass is pointing me in, but I know what path it’s pointing me down.”
“Jesus, Emily way to bring out all the stops on that one. Don’t make anyone feel compelled to go back and read everything they just skipped over or anything.”
“The real story is in the footnotes, I.d.”
“Christ, I hate you.”