From GGibberish to Purpose

I decided to start a blog in 2016 with the goal of finding my passion and purpose in life. At the time, I wondered if my purpose was to simply find happiness because that felt so elusive to me. In more defined terms, to be happy with myself exactly as I am and find happiness within my life, but that didn’t seem right because it felt selfish and did not focus on doing good with anything or anyone outside of myself. Shouldn’t one’s purpose in life include positively making a difference with the world, no matter how small? In my blog, I planned to write about a variety of things I enjoy as a way to explore my interests further. It was my hope through seemingly directionless random posts digging into things that delight me would lead me to discover my true passions and ultimately determine my purpose in life. This writing process was precisely the reason why I chose to title my blog GGibberish, which is defined as “confused or meaningless writing”. Of course, I had to add the second ‘G’ in front of the word to coincide with my nickname “Gigi” to brand the blog as my own. As the years went by and my activity with the blog waxed and waned, it really mostly waned, I didn’t feel I made much progress with my goal. But through my blogging, I can say travel, food, crafts and writing are all things I love. However, I still felt uncertain because I couldn’t say with confidence if any are my passion nor did I see any becoming my purpose in life.

With Covid in 2020 and 2021, I began hating my life because I was no longer able to travel, stuck at home working very long hours at a job that was not bringing me joy, but rather a lot of stress. Prior to the lockdown, I was traveling over 200 days a year and eating good food, both significantly alleviating the stress from my job. Shifting my lifestyle from barely being home more than 2 weeks at a time to not leaving my house for weeks at a time and only for necessary errands, plus having to eat my own cooking day after day, was difficult and resulted in my unhappiness. There was no longer anything to look forward to either in my day to day life or long term. I felt I was only existing and going through the same motions everyday.

Wanting to do something different that would utilize my creative side and bring me some joy, I tried my hand at writing and quickly discovered I was good enough to have 3 of my short stories, which I submitted to a contest shortly after I started writing, chosen to be published in an electronic book. As work continued to become more stressful, I found myself not only feeling a yearning, but actually a need to write. It became a means to find a little happiness and relieve stress from both work and the drastic change to my lifestyle. Within 6 months of being published for the first time, another short story I wrote was selected for me to read at a live event, then my first poem I’d written in decades was chosen to be published in an anthology and read at a corresponding live event and finally another short story was selected to be read at an online virtual event. I couldn’t help but wonder if writing and reading my work out loud, after receiving positive feedback on my performances, could possibly be my purpose.

Taking a step back I began to ask myself if writing is my passion and if becoming an author could be my true calling in life. It was not a question I could answer with 100% confidence, so I began asking myself more introspective questions. Pursuing a career as an author is no easy task and not a decision I can make lightly. Am I passionate enough about writing to deal with all the challenges I would have to go through to pursue it? It quickly became clear to me that I can’t determine my purpose in life if I don’t have confidence in knowing what my passions are. Then I thought, how can I come to a clear conclusion on what I love to do and claim it as a passion if I know deep down that I don’t even love myself. I have heard the saying that you can’t truly love someone else until you learn to love yourself first. I imagine the same must be true about one’s own passions in life. How can I love doing something so much that I can say it is my passion when I don’t love myself first? And how can I love myself when I don’t even know who I am?? I have never taken the time to get to know myself deeply.

Upon asking myself all these questions and thinking about it, I realized it was time for me to dig deep and begin my spiritual journey to discover exactly who Gigi is and who I want to become. I have heard the term many times, along with people doing shadow work and inner child work. I don’t know much about these concepts, but what I do know, is that I have a sudden burning desire to look within to understand myself as deeply as I can. I want to do this by looking at myself through different lenses, while also asking myself thoughtful questions and reflecting on the answers that come to me. I’m sure there are a variety of methods to go about this, but I plan to basically go with what I think is the right way for me based on how I feel, using writing as my primary vehicle to get there.

So how do I plan to get to know myself? While I don’t have it all figured out, planning to go with flow and see where things take me, I do have some ideas of where I want to start. When I asked myself, how do I want to get to know and understand me? I came up with a few different answers.

The first is Astrology. While most of my life I’ve always resonated with the majority of the descriptions of Scorpios, there were factors that did not fit me at all. I realized only last year that there is so much more to astrology than I was aware of. After learning about natal or birth charts, it quickly became clear to me why a person’s sun sign is too generic and explains why it doesn’t really fit the masses of people born within that specified time frame. The exact time and location of a person’s birth, results in a natal chart that is as unique as each person’s fingerprint. Even twins will not have the same exact natal chart because they are born at different times, usually only minutes apart, but that still makes all the difference. It was only after reading my in depth natal chart report referencing all the planets and houses that a lightbulb moment came to me. It was uncanny how the entire natal chart report resonated with my complex uniqueness that makes me, Me! Then I discovered there are actually different types of astrology, with Tropical being the one most Westerners are aware of. When I took a peek at Sidereal or Vedic Astrology, I surprisingly learned that I’m not even a Scorpio, but rather a Libra instead. This led me to believe there must be something more to astrology. Therefore this is a topic I want to dive into to see if this is one way to get to know myself better.

Second is numerology where it is believed that specific numbers such as the birth day, life path, soul urge, expression, personality and even cell phone numbers may shed light on each individual person’s life purpose, innate gifts, flaws, and shortcomings.

The third approach is evaluating personality test results I’ve taken over the years such as the Myers-Briggs (16 personality types), Enneagram (9 personality types), and work focused ones like StandOut (9 role types), StrengthsFinder and High 5.

Fourth is shadow and inner child work as I previously mentioned.

Last but not least, is to continue blogging about other various topics of interest and random gibberish, because who knows what still may come out of that. Plus writing is the one love I have that I would like to pursue further, whether it is my passion or purpose in life or not.

While I feel I am, once again, trying to do the same thing I set out to do years ago, which I have consistently failed at, there is a difference now. That difference is a fire that burns inside me to pursue this in a way I never have before. There is both an eagerness to put my journey out there for the world to observe, coupled with a sense of indifference over what anyone may think as I put out all the nitty gritty details for anyone to see. I mention this because since as long as I can remember, I have always felt the desperate need to be hidden. By that, I mean hiding my genuine thoughts and feelings as well as hiding behind inauthentic actions that I felt obligated to do because it is what was deemed as acceptable. Acceptable by society, religion or people who matter to me and even those who don’t all because that is what I felt was expected of me and I had to do what was defined as right by all of the aforementioned. While I’ve said I don’t care what people think many times in the past, I realize the way I live my life shows I have feared rejection all of my life. But after recently going through a chapter of feeling judged and disapproved of by people for a single action I made based on what I felt was for my own good and happiness, it became clear to me I need to stop living for others and start living for myself.

I am going to write and subsequently record my blog posts to podcast episodes to keep myself accountable with making consistent progress on the goal that I set out for myself. I am choosing to record the blog posts as a podcast because people I know prefer that over reading and want to follow me as I proceed with writing to find my purpose. Whether people read my posts or listen to the audio podcast version is not of any real substantial significance to me. And I do want to make this next point very clear. I am not doing any of this for anyone’s benefit or entertainment, the sole reason I am going through all this effort is exclusively for my own selfish motives. But the fact of the matter is, I am not a person who lives in a bubble and there are many people who have shaped me to become the person I am today simply through interactions with them. I may mention things from my past that involved others, but the intent is to plainly to dive into my own raw truth, not anyone else’s. Everything I express will be from my perspective only as there is no way for me to really know anyone else’s viewpoint and opinion. If anyone finds any issue with what I write, then I would straightforwardly say to you, your choice to either read my blog or listen to my podcast or not is exactly that. It is your choice. My intent is not to annoy, infuriate, hurt, offend or anything else negative to anyone. If that is the result for any reason, you are under no obligation to continue following me and I would recommend you stop engaging with the content that I put out.

So that is everything I wanted as an introduction to all the content that will come after this. This is my own little world on the web and I am looking forward to documenting how I attempt to discover who I am, learn to love myself, recognize my passions and figure out how to turn my passion into purpose that hopefully has some sort of positive impact with the world. I hope from writing gibberish, I can finally come to my purpose.

Welcome to GGibberish!