Eat, Work, Pray, Die, Love.
Lessons about career, identity and hunger to transform myself from four decades of life.
If there is something that I can tell you is that I have ate almost everything in this assorted buffet that is life. I have had so many life styles and identity models, that I used to say that I am on my fifth or sixth version only in this existence. What I know about my identity have been fed by all theses experiences.
With ten years-old, I left home to study in the “big city”, as kind of a reward for my “academic brilliance” and good behavior. Right after my 20’s, my father died and I was catapulted to the work environment, where I continued to be rewarded because of my productivity. So, I was specially good in follow the script of the intelligent well-behaved girl, distinguished for the “right reasons”, but not too much to the point of causing any discomfort on the status quo.
When almost thirty, I have let to die my successful career in the corporate world, my good stable salary, my status, my home, my family and friends, my city, and everything I have known as right (and recognized as such by everybody around me) to throw myself in the abyss of the unknown.
So, I decided to explore a bunch of stuff very different from the so-called “comfort zone”. I jump into a new career into purposeful entrepreneurship, unstable income, which status was dependent on the quantity of interactions on social media, away from my blood family and having to create a new chosen family, exploring other cities, and constantly looking for something new and for the next thing that would take me to levels of happiness ever reached before by old standards.
When I turned 40, everything I had began to buy as a new and definitive “healthy” life style, years ago, all truths I was collecting, have also died.
The kind of career and way of work that I bought to replace the first one has also shown to be limited and oppressive, including how work, money and status were still having a very central part as a reference of a “person that has the right life”. In a way that, more and more, looks like a new package of the same consumerist and addicted logic that the corporate world have corroborated years before.
The search of being “out of box” exhausted me as the stressful day-to-day of a multinational business, that had made me collapse before. With the addendum that the world seemed much less complex to deal with back then.
And I am again in a revision process.
Yes, there is a bunch of pain in this process. As a highly-sensitive person, I can add much drama, what creates more suffering. As a person with stubbornness to spare, I can add a lot of resistance, what creates a longer delay. As a person full of self-criticism, I can add a lot of judgement, what creates anxiety.
As a therapist that I went to said once, it’s needed to be able to recognize that there is the phase of the butterfly’s metamorphosis that it is neither caterpillar nor butterfly, it is closed down in the dark of the cocoon living as a soup of amorphous cells, knowing that it could no longer be a caterpillar, but not yet knowing that it is getting wings e what is going to be.
Ten years ago, I though that I had have left behind what caused me most pain and limitation, which was related to my rational side more pronounced, to my masculine energy toxicity in charge, to using the reference of what my surroundings dictated. I went to embrace with open heart my oppressed emotional side, my feminine energy that was sickened, and to use a reference very different from people with more diversified experiences. The feminine that came across end up suppressing the masculine because it has hurt me so bad.
Now, I have to leave all this behind too.
Today, I came here to kill in a public square a lot that I know about myself as “ my identity”. I am going to tell you that this is not the first time I’ve done it, and I seriously suspect it will not be the last, and suspect even more you’ve been there and will be there also. OK, maybe you didn’t do it so publicly, but with witnesses enough to confirm how much you have changed.
It has come the moment that I can’t live with no part of me subdued to other, ignored or referred as toxic or evil no more. I need to make peace with these two parts of me, to not judge the masculine because it got me sick in the body and in the mid, to not judge the feminine because it got me financially and professionally unstable.
Because every phase and part of me got me precious benefits. My masculine was able to create a career that gave me lots of financial resourced that supported a good part of my journey of rescue my feminine. My feminine was able to create relationships with myself and with other people that gave me lots of emotional resources that support me and my journey of rescuing my masculine. A journey for the rest of my existence.
For me, it is not possible to live fragmented anymore.
My hunger now is of integrity of all parts that I am made of being validated in their needs, and to learn to use impermanence as a lever of liberation, not only as a source of suffering.
My food now is love as the foundation of my connection with myself and other people and beings, from the fact that all parts of me and of the world that exist are valid and offer nutrition to my soul, even when it doesn’t make much logical or obvious sense.
My preparation method now is authenticity in day-to-day actions, of everything that is part of what I understand as my identity, to have more awareness when there is attachment or aversion.
And my main utensil now, in this kitchen of life, is intuition, because there is not a more pure and beautiful manifestation of the amalgamation of feminine and masculine, of rational and emotional, of synergy of all parts that we and the world are made of than the manifestation of a wisdom that it is the same time innate and built.
When I do suffer, I aspire this can be my reference, that doesn’t come from outside or inside, but from both and nowhere. When I do suffer, I aspire that I don’t try to muffle it and try to get rid of it, but to ally myself to what causes me pain because there is there a lot beyond a teaching, there is love too. When I do suffer, I aspire to not blame myself or other or the world, because instead of creating more suffering, I vow to create more joy and compassion.
And when I do feel contentment and connection, that I can remember that they are true, and that they are a valid and important part of life. And that even if they don’t stay forever, it doesn’t matter the career or life style that I choose, that I delight myself with what that experience provides me, and share it with more beings, not as a way to try to annul suffering or to show myself to others well, but as one of many things we are able as humans.
And even if I have already said many of these words before, and even if I already have struggle a lot in practice all of these, I aspire that I can reach beyond of judging and forgive myself, get my scattered pieces and move on. I aspire for me to just relax and live.
Originally published in Brazilian Portuguese at https://medium.com on May 20, 2019.
