People say that I should do what I love and the money will follow, but I think that I would end up sleeping all day.
What should I do?
That’s a great question. Is it true that you should do what you love and the money will follow? What if what you really do love is laying in bed, eating potato chips? What if you only love playing Candy Crush and drinking wine? What if you love binging reality TV shows?
If everybody did what they loved would we end up with a world full of firemen and superhero-wannabes? Or would we have a bunch of models and actresses and singers and nobody would get the real work done?
Honestly, does it even make sense to let ourselves be guided by what we love?
Well, the truth is that I don’t think that’s what people mean when they say “do what you love.”
I would hazard a guess that when people say they only love eating Oreos while watching reruns of the Bachelor, this isn’t actually true. My hunch is that people have denied what they truly loved for so long that they now find themselves only wanting to eat sugary snacks and get their minds off of anything real.
It takes a bit of peeling back the layers to remember what you truly love.
In fact, here’s how the cycle usually goes:
You likely had a natural inclination toward something and it was somehow communicated to you that indulging that feeling wasn’t practical, it didn’t matter, it’s silly, it’s foolish or there is some other reason that you should just forget about it. (Note that oftentimes our “leaders” are thinking something like, “If I didn’t get to do what I loved, then you can’t either.”)
So, you don’t let your emotions inform your actions.
You were taught (overtly or covertly) to suppress that part of you that knew what it loved. And because you haven’t listened to what truly brings you joy – in fact, haven’t followed those threads really at all – you now turn to things like Oreos and reality TV to avoid thinking about those things. Once you have suppressed those feelings for long enough, you likely won’t even be able to know that they exist at all, much less identify them. If you find yourself saying that Oreos and reruns of the Bachelorette are your true joy, you might want to stop and rethink that.
Sit for a minute and try to retrace your steps – what used to bring you joy? You don’t find many kids who actually want to sit around binging on cookies. You might think they would, but a healthy kid will only eat until they are satisfied – no more, no less.
So now you can allow yourself to get back to a base level of allowing all of your inner emotional responses, all of your instincts.
If you can access the honest-to-goodness real emotions and grant yourself the permission to feel them, you likely won’t find yourself sitting on your bed eating bon-bons all day – at least not every day. The real feelings are there. They are somewhere underneath all of that superficial stuff.
Start paying attention. This requires a total paradigm shift, a peeling back of layer after layer after layer after layer to try and find the real you – you are under there somewhere.
