WOTW: 4. Determination

Unlike the last chapter WOTW: 3. Renew there are several things in the “Word of the Week” book, chapter 4 titled “Determination” that I wanted to further ruminate through writing. I have one quick callout: There were some things in this chapter that caught my attention that I do not plan to go through here now. Rather, I am choosing to defer a few quotes to be further elaborated on the Chapter 5 post since I found some correlation between this and the next chapter.

At the end of the first page in chapter 4 it states:  “Determination is knowing why you are doing something. With determination… the goal is…to invite change within ourselves.”  As I proceed through my journey of changing from within through my goals of discovering who I am, learning to love myself, recognizing my passions and figuring out how to turn my passion into purpose that has a positive impact, the question of “WHY AM I DOING ALL THIS TO BEGIN WITH?” became a blaring question that I need to answer.

The push to answer this question was only further reinforced when I began following a fellow certified Feng shui consultant, who is on his own journey with a goal of doing 100 Feng shui livestreams on YouTube. When watching one of his lives, I was chatting with him and the conversation shifted to him articulating his own “WHY” – why he started Feng shui as well as who he wants help and how he can help them through Feng Shui.  Hearing him drove me even more to want to come up with my own answer.  Feel free to watch his channel, called Classical Fengshui with George 🙂 to learn basics about classical Feng shui. If you would like to watch the episode where he talks about his “WHY” you can access it here.

What is my “WHY” for doing all this blogging and putting in time and effort with going From GGibberish to Purpose? Before I get to that, I want to express that I feel apprehensive about diving into this because I can’t easily come up with a clear, concise and concrete answer right off the top of my head.  I will attempt to get to that now by free writing what comes into my head.  So bear with me if this comes out a bit disjointed since as I’ve said before, my goal is to write in a way that is not filtered or where I go back and edit it based on fear of oversharing and being vulnerable that it departs too far from what I originally wrote.

I’ll start with the question of ‘WHY do I want to discover who I am?’  I have thought to myself many times in the past, I don’t really know who I am deep down.  That makes me sad and embarrassed because being in my mid-40’s, I’d expect to already know who I am.  I kept my true thoughts and feelings under wraps most of my life and rarely let those come out. I have been making decisions and taking actions based on what was expected of me or what I thought is the right thing to do, because external factors dictated them more often than not.  I formed this shell of a person by living with a foundational belief or value system that is not genuine to the true person I am inside.  It’s as if I’m an actress in a soap opera of my life who has been playing a role since I was a child and associate with the character I’m playing more than the person I actually am when I don’t put that façade on.  I have now reached a point where I can no longer play that role without feeling so uncomfortable in my own skin that I know I cannot continue doing it.  So my answer to WHY I want to discover who I am is so that I can not only recognize, but allow all that is inside of me to come out and be.  Furthermore, I hope that leads to feeling comfortable in my own skin because I will be once and for all, genuine inside and out.

Next is the question of ‘WHY learn to love myself?’  This feels a little bit easier to answer.  I want to love my boyfriend, friends and family to my fullest capacity and I believe that in order to truly love others, you have to love yourself first. I sense that I am short changing my love to others, that the love I give is not as deep and wholistic as the potential that it can be.  I don’t believe I can get to that higher level without loving myself first.  To get there, I recognize that I not only need to know myself, but accept myself from the good, the bad and the ugly.

I don’t love myself because I don’t accept all of me yet.  One of the big reasons why I have kept my thoughts and feelings inside all my life is because I have SUCH a dark side to me.  I wouldn’t be surprised if in my past life I was evil being because I can think of the most negative, sick & twisted, horribly awful things with ease and even derive pleasure from those thoughts.  This is the type of stuff that I worry would probably cause people to throw me into a mental hospital if they heard the depths of it.  I know that while I have this very dark side to me of having these bad thoughts and emotions, that I do not act on them, which still makes me a good person overall.  There is a big difference between thinking about something negative and taking action to execute that negative thought and I don’t do horrendous things.  I sometimes find myself reveling in my vile thoughts, and often feel immense guilt for it, but I need to accept that is a part of me so that I can eventually love all of me – the good, the bad and the terrible ugly ME!  It is when I accomplish that when I will  be able to take the next step of fully finding all my passions.

Moving on to the third question, which is ‘WHY do I want to discover my passions?’ is also not as difficult to answer now that I am spent some time to focus on it.  Here is what I came up with.  Through exploring my interests to get to my passions, I will figure out what lights me up.  The happiness and joy I feel by doing something that is a passion is why I want to discover them.  It will be the things that, even when *ish hits the fan, I still want to do it because ultimately I still enjoy it through whatever struggles and obstacles come my way.  Millions of things I have done are not related to passion and while they have gotten me to where I am, most have not brought me even close to feeling bliss.  So I can’t help but wonder, ‘Why am I wasting time and energy on all these other things, especially when some of them actually make me feel bad?’  Life is short and I have wasted most of mine doing things I have absolutely no passion to do.  I will regret that and I hate knowing that I will have that regret to deal with.  I want to live my life with as few regrets as possible.  Though I have a lot stacked up already, I don’t want to continue adding to the list.  At least by trying potential passions, even if die tomorrow, I will have some peace of mind that I started the process and experienced my true happiness instead of never even bothering to put any effort into anything at all.

Finally the most important question is ‘WHY do I want to find my purpose in life and specifically want it to have a positive impact outside of myself?’ The first answer that comes to my head is, if I don’t have a purpose, and even more so that there is no real benefit of that purpose outside of me, then what is the point of living to begin with? There is no real reason to do anything I do, from interacting with friends and family, working my job, much less getting up in the morning. Ideally my purpose will have to do with my passions, so that I will derive positive emotions from it, such as happiness, joy and bliss, and if it is of benefit outside of me, then it is also meaningful and rewarding.

Based on this free writing exercise, I have come to the conclusion that my answer to the question of ‘WHY am I blogging From GGibberish to Purpose?’ is: To achieve meaningful and rewarding happiness and love by regularly living my passions as my true and genuine self.  Now that is an answer I feel comfortable with!

There are actually a few more quotes that I want to share from the chapter in this post, but plan to go over these briefly since this is already so long spending hours on coming up with my WHY.

First up is “Determine your rest and downtime…Otherwise, you’ll force it through sickness or injury.” I wanted to call this out because this is an area that I am terrible with.  I push myself beyond my limits all the time and this has affected my health time and time again.  Perfect example is as I am typing this blog now, I’ve been having pain in my arm and wrist from spending hours at the computer both working a full day then spending hours after work writing this blog.  I’ve been doing this day in and day out for weeks now and it is taking a toll.  In fact, even though I didn’t publish anything yesterday, I spent several hours after work starting 3 different drafts about astrology, numerology and Feng shui.  This is a recurring issue that has come up many times over the years when I don’t listen to my body and force myself to push through pain so I can complete whatever my goal is, which in the past has has nothing to do with my passions.  With work, I always have the goal of trying to finish everything I have to do because I simply hate not completing everything.  I have worked more 15 hour days consistently than I care to admit over 20 years of my career.  I know I need to change this and set boundaries with my job because if I keep this up, my body will force me to stop.   It has year after year with at least a couple days a year where I end up calling out of work sick because the pain in my body is so great I literally struggle moving and even getting out of bed.

Next is “Determine how you want to feel and let those desired feeling(s) guide your decisions throughout the day. If you want to feel accomplished, make decisions aligned with accomplishing.”  This is directly tied to the one above.  For the past 3 weeks, I have been consistently choosing to accomplish my goal of writing 111 blog posts by the end of 2022, but to the detriment of my own well being since day after day I am continuing to type for hours and hours to the point I am triggering an old injury.  Yet here I am still typing instead of stopping to rest.  The little voice in my head is saying you are so close to the end of this post! And that is why I don’t want to and am not stopping just yet!

Lastly, “Determine your self-investment plan. Trigger your creativity.” I want to grow myself and do that through what is mentioned in the book, which includes taking classes, learning a new language, and arts and crafts.  Choosing to become a certified classical Feng shui consultant was a direct result of wanting to take a class to expand my knowledge in something that I was curious about.  The next class I would like to take is one on astrology.  I also want to relearn the Spanish language, since that is something I did in high school and was pretty quick to pick up.  As for arts and crafts, writing is obviously my first choice when it comes to creative arts, but there are a couple other hands on things such as dot painting, learning how to work with resin and building furniture that I want to do.