Until death, do you and your purpose apart. Or not.
Does creativity require a sacrifice of the Self?
This is the Next: the Newsletter, the weekly newsletter that mixes personal essays and social critique, and, where I, inspired by literature, psychology, and all my spiritual practices, attempt to make meaning out of what happens: to me, and to us all.
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In 2018, I watched, together with my boyfriend, “The Lost City of Z,” the 2016 movie, directed by James Gray. The movie, inspired by a true story reconstructed by New Yorker magazine staff writer David Grann, tells the tale of British explorer, Percy Fawcett, who, in 1952, disappeared in the Amazon forest, together with his son, and a friend. Apparently, Fawcett had been warned by the Kalapalo tribe, in the region of Mato Grosso in Brazil, that eastward of their settlement, there was an area controlled by some “fierce Indians.” That did not deter Fawcett one bit from venturing in that direction to find the lost city he was looking for. According to Kalapalo’s oral accounts, the smoke oozing off of Fawcett’s campground could be observed at night for five days, until it disappeared. Fawcett was never found. Neither were his comrades.
When I first watched the movie, I wrote in my diary about it, telling myself that, “you must search for your purpose, you must seek—in order to be really you—even if it means you might leave others behind.” Further down on the same page, I wondered how “I could find balance, between my need to find purpose and to accept myself (and others) fully. Could I keep evolving without having to destroy everything that I was, without destroying everyone around me?”
Today, I see this as faulty logic. I read those lines and think that there was no need for an “either… or.” What’s more, I see that what I needed was to understand that only by accepting myself first, could I actually pursue that which would make me come alive.
I was at a time in my life when I kept wondering who I was, and what I wanted. By day, I worked as an Account Manager in Sales, focusing on website monetization. I felt supported by my colleagues and like I had the leeway I longed for. By night, I dreamed of writing a book, of giving talks, of speaking on the radio. I dreamed of words: written, spoken, heard, shouted, whispered, thought of.
I felt like an imposter, though not in the way the term is commonly understood in pop psych. I did not feel like I was “faking it ‘til I’d make it,” nor was I under the impression that I was fooling everybody, pretending to be good at something I wasn’t. My sense of being an imposter had nothing to do with performance. It had to do with the fact that I was living a life that did not feel aligned with the one I wanted to live. That made me an “imposter,” in the terminology of Susan Schwartz, Ph.D.: unable to connect with the people around me as I kept showing up for them, as someone I felt, deeply underneath my skin, I was not, nor was I meant to be.
I seemed to have embarked on a trajectory I did not want to be on. I remember having a conversation with a manager once, who, listening to my aspirations, painted a possible path for me that stretched ten years into the future, and felt like a very tight corset I could never even breathe into, let alone thrive into. And as I sat across from her, and heard her speak, I took in her words, knowing all the same that her wisdom was not of the kind I was seeking. Because when I saw her, I never asked myself, “How did she do it?” What I asked myself was, “is this really what makes her happy?”
From the outside, it might look like she was further ahead on the path than I was.
The truth, however, was that I felt like I’d stumbled on the same path she’d followed, and now knew with absolute certainty that it was the wrong path for me.
It’s not that I wasn’t looking for mentors. It is that my mentors had made altogether different decisions from the ones she was suggesting I’d consider.
To take a geographic metaphor, it felt like I was constantly planning a future on the beaches of Australia, but felt like I was on a flight heading towards the skyscrapers of New York. And this wasn’t a case of the trajectory being somewhat off course, taking a detour to admire the landscape. I was getting further and further from who I wanted to be, and felt that I was. New York was a career in the corporate sector where I would be forever climbing up a ladder, forever following someone else’s priorities and ideas of what success looked like. Authenticity required a difficult choice: stepping off the path I was on, and starting the long journey towards where I wanted to go.
That possibility scared me.
Susan Schwartz, Ph.D. talks about the feeling of living someone else’s life—a life dictated by what others seem to want for us (or what we have internalized we must want, based on the clues we’ve picked up in our environment)—in her book “Imposter Syndrome & the ‘As-If’ Personality in Analytical Psychology.”
As she explains, the as-if personality has to do with the feeling that, no matter where you go or not matter what you do, you are invisible. This is, of course, not a fact, but a perception.
Say the sentence, “I feel like a fraud” to a bunch of friends, and they will probably reassure you that you are not. It’s the kind of response that such a question elicits, even when we know that such reassurance is bound to make no difference. Ultimately, if you’re feeling like you’re not expressing who you are, it is up to you to take off the mask and show up as your real self.
But it is hard.
In 2018, at the height of my personal crisis, I was surrounded by people who sang my praises, especially at work, where, at least on paper, I was succeeding. As an Account Manager, my goal was that of driving sales across a portfolio made of three large partners. I could not be any least excited about driving those sales. What I kept doing was to pick up any occasion to share my insights from my yoga, meditation and spiritual journey. When I was supposed to give a talk about monetization strategy, I would talk about ways to “strive for gold.” My speech was full of words that belong in tech. In my mind, I was only talking about the journey of the soul.
Ironically, that worked better than ever. For the first time I was getting the accolades I had been striving towards for years, and, all the while, I kept opening our metrics dashboard telling myself I just had to remember one number, one: the approximate value of my portfolio. This wasn’t a complex number to remember either: a specific digit, followed by an easy-to-retain number of zeros. But I just couldn’t. Two years in a sales role with three partners and I never managed to learn that number.
It felt like it went against who I was to even care about it.
But at the same time, I felt like I didn’t have the strength to act in coherence with my wishes and dreams. If I wanted to be writing, why didn’t I? If I wanted to launch my podcast, what was keeping me from doing so?
It was easier to imagine I was accomplishing my dreams, than to actually take them seriously. I took some steps in the direction I wanted to head towards—holding a meditation course in the office, step up as diversity lead—but when it came to the big dream—writing—I held back.
And part of the reason was, I was afraid of the sacrifice I would have to make in order to embody who I wanted to be. Sometimes it even felt that to be who I was would require sacrificing everything: from my beautiful flat, to my boyfriend. From the flowers in the garden to the healthy food I was eating. From my gym subscription to my healthcare benefits. To imagine success, on the other hand, did not require giving something up. It felt safe.
Still, it gives me pause that, after watching “The Lost City of Z”—at the core, a cautionary tale—I did not ponder how Fawcett had recklessly pursued his goal. Fawcett was, in a sense, captive of the explorer archetype, so determined to find a lost city, that he was willing to lose himself for it.
Years later, what I would tell my then-scared self, is that the journey towards authenticity does not need to push us towards duality: it does not need to be a journey of “either… or.” It can be a journey of “yes… and,” that expands the container, that allows us to feel not as if we are imposters, living as-if, but simply alive.
It does require sacrifice, though: not of the things that make us who we are, and not of the Self, but of those many things we have come to believe give or sustain the value, we give to our Self. And to ourselves.