Wednesday, May 28, 2014

17 quotes about feeling different, finding your place in the world, and discovering your self-worth

Sometimes I feel glaringly different from most people, which makes it nearly impossible to find people who truly "get" me.

Sometimes I feel incredibly lost, confused and scared and don't really know where I belong anymore.

Sometimes I feel perplexed over why my existence makes a real difference in the world.

If you can relate to any of the above statements, maybe the following 17 quotes will comfort you as much as they have comforted me:

1. "The point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

2. "You alone are enough. You have nothing to prove to anyone." ~ Maya Angelou

3. "More important than the quest for certainty is the quest for clarity." ~ Francois Gautier

4. "What sets you apart can sometimes feel like a burden, and it's not. A lot of the time, it's what makes you great." ~ Emma Stone

5. "You have to leave the city of your comfort zone and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself." ~ Alan Alda

6. "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." ~ Henry David Thoreau

7. "I believe if I knew where I was going, I'd lose my way." ~ Christina Perri

8. "You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop." ~ Rumi

9. "We grew up learning to cheer on the underdog because we see ourselves in them." ~ Shane Koyczan

10. "To be nobody but yourself in a world doing its best to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight." ~ E.E. Cummings

11. "What a gloomy thing, not to know the address of one's soul." ~ Victor Hugo

12. "I don't entirely approve of some of the things I have done, or am, or have been. But I'm me. God knows, I'm me." ~ Elizabeth Taylor

13. "I'm a creep. I'm a weirdo. What the hell am I doing here? I don't belong here." ~ Radiohead

14. "You have to be the bravest person in the world to go out every day, being yourself when no one likes who you are." ~ Matthew Dicks

15. "I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive." ~ Joseph Campbell

16. "Nobody can say anything better than you can, because you have your own story to tell, your own life to live, and your own lens through which you see the world." ~ Ashlee Gadd

17. "It's okay to not know where you're going. For some people, direction is a vision, a plan, an exact idea of where they want to go and how. I admire those people, but I'm not one of them. Rarely in my life have I known exactly what would fulfill me in the future." ~ Lori Deschene

<3 Madison

Monday, May 5, 2014

Rough patch

I haven't really let on to you guys because I have a habit of wanting everything in my life to seem at least adequately "together," but I've been trudging through a rather treacherous rough patch in my professional life lately.

I've been thinking a lot about the long-term, which is something I rarely do. It's okay to live in the moment and take life day by day. In fact, it's pretty essential for me. But I think it's also important to at least consider the long-term repercussions of your big decisions, whether it's choosing a career, a life partner, a house, a new city to live in, etc. And the more I think about the long-term repercussions of my career choice, the more daunted and discouraged I feel. At the rate I'm going and with the extremely unfortunate lack of motivation and experience I have under my belt, I can't help but envision a future of working four jobs I hate while doing my freelance work on the side IF I even feel like it.

I wonder if I've had my head in the clouds this whole time. I knew being a freelance writer wouldn't be impossible, but I didn't think it would SEEM so impossible at times. When I get discouraged, I basically want to hide under my covers and check out from the rest of the world. It's awful. Picking myself up and deciding to keep going every day just doesn't even feel like an option sometimes. I WANT to keep writing, but I'm seriously starting to wonder if writing alone is going to cut it when not having a stable career is no longer acceptable. I've been working another little job on the side, and while it's nice to have more money to play with, it still doesn't give me the financial independence I long for.

It's like I've lost sight of my reasons for wanting to be a writer in the first place, and I can only remind myself of those reasons so many times before they start to sound like an annoying and meaningless broken record. I've worked for free. I've worked for less money than I make at my other job, and my other job is twenty times easier (What's wrong with that picture, my fellow creatives?) I lack the social skills and self-esteem to network and promote myself. I've gotten lazy. I've gotten confused. I've gotten lost. I have epic epiphanies about following my true path and then completely forget which path I'm on two weeks later. I write down goals, intentions, insights, and reasons for continuing to do what I do and then let them all collect dust. It's this constant push/pull, up/down, wonderful/awful process, and I just flat out don't feel good enough to manage it without breaking into hives or crying. What if I'm NOT good enough? What if freelancing isn't for me? What if I have to start all over and rebuild my little work life from the ground up? If I can't be a writer, I don't really want to be anything.

I was honestly going to try my best to end this post on a positive note. I was going to write myself a letter or offer advice to people who were going through the same thing. But now that I have all these unfiltered thoughts out in front of me, contradicting them would feel like forced bullshit. And I don't ever want to feed you guys forced bullshit. I try my best to be inspiring and offer as much hope as I can because it's the number one reason I do what I do, but sometimes I just don't have the answers. I don't expect you to have the answers either.

I'm not going to give up or stop writing, you guys. But I am going to stop thinking that I somehow deserve the success I don't even know how to earn anymore. I am going to try to find myself again because the only way to find yourself is to lose yourself....over and over and over.

<3 Madison