Life: Whether you Like it or Not.

For many years, I’ve considered my personal and professional stagnation as though I were a traveler sitting at the base of a crossroad. The sign pointing in many directions reads any manner of options, but I sit there, gazing at the sign for eons, waiting for one of the arrows to light up, to indicate, This, here, Molly, is the way to go. This is the path to your destiny. This is the path to fulfillment, release, energy and passion. It may be cloudy at parts, but we promise, this is the way toward your highest good.

Yet, signposts have an annoying way of being inanimate, and this revelation has never happened.

But as I sit today, I recognize something new. Beyond the fork in the road, I’m beginning to see another path that I hadn’t identified before. It’s the path of my true desires.

I have sat waiting for the gods to tell me a or b, but secretly, I’ve always wanted c, and refused to see that as an option. “It’s hard for your to let yourself dream,” a therapist opined recently.

And it is.

To speak aloud what you truly want is to invite criticism and disappointment. Better to keep the dreams locked tight, even to the detriment of myself, because it’s “easier” than going after what I really want.

The problem with that pattern is that it means you don’t develop a history and a catalogue of places where you have moved beyond those doubts and spoken up, acted up, been seen. And so you continue to assume what you really want is not something you can have.

The history of denying what I want is long. It is best to be quiet, unheard, unseen, have few needs, because the lower you set the bar the easier it is to meet the meagerness.

I reflected yesterday on the way to our preview night of the play how you can always set yourself up to “succeed” when you place the bar achingly low. When you paint over your dreams with “realistic expectations,” you’re never called to reach out of your comfort zone. You can sit on the couch watching Netflix until the end of time, eating peanut butter out of a jar, and quietly erode all sense of the divine spark within you.

Not that I’ve done that. (wink)

But the divine has a way of being omnipresent, no matter what you do to ignore, dismiss, or erode its guidance and encouragement.

I haven’t a clue what experiences I’m opening up to as I watch this third path unfurl before me. Recognizing foremost that I’ve denied myself the ability to see what I’ve always wanted is a start. Recognizing that I’ve refused to acknowledge that I can have what I want, that my needs don’t have to be pauperistic, that it is safe in the reality of today to express myself is a start.

I’ve written many times before about the emerging option of being safe and seen. Safe doesn’t mean “not bold,” or setting the bar low, here. It means that I am not going to be punished for wanting what I want this lifetime.

This is a hard concept for me to integrate. But, more slowly than I would really love, I’m accepting that the sanest, safest, and surest way toward fulfillment is actually believing it’s available. Whenever I’m good and ready to set down the peanut butter and walk toward it.