YOU ARE ENOUGH (2/2)

About a week ago, the makers of The Tapping Solution app launched a You Are Enough challenge. For 8 consecutive days, we were encouraged to do a daily tapping meditation by the same name to see what shifts occurred in the ways we thought about ourselves and are enough-ness. Or lack thereof.

Because I like a time-bound challenge, I signed up. Not because, the idea of not being enough actually resonated with me in any kind of desperate way. But hey-ho, I thought. Let’s give it a go.

Every day that I’m tapping away, I’m thinking nothing’s happening, this isn’t working, I don’t need to do this. Then on the last of the 8 days, I get this crushing follow-up email from 7UP and I think, you know what, I want to quit my job.

Because what I discovered about myself, and the cultural norms that we unconsciously sign-up to whilst doing this tapping, actually blew the lid off. And gave me a new way to frame my beef with work, money, career and the creative life.    

How art I not enough?

Let me count the ways.

How ever hard I try, I can’t seem to earn anything approaching even an average salary. Plenty of other people do, why not me?  This is a source of embarrassment and shame and sign of failure. A sign that I’m not enough.

Every job I’ve taken (and I’ve had a few), I dread showing up to. What is wrong with me?? Many of my friends have stayed in the same jobs for years. How do they do that? Ergo, I’m not enough.

I just cannot seem to sit at desk in an office and look at a screen for anything approaching 8 hours. Why not? Most of the population seem to manage some variation of this. This must mean too, that as a human entity, I’m not efficient or productive. Not enough.

So, by most available contemporary, metrics;  those of wealth, job status and productivity (all of which I’d unknowingly bought into), it turned out that I really am NOT enough.

And what I discovered was this really weighs on me.  

Like lugging around a corpse all day long.

And actually I have been.

My own.

And I realise how mortally tired I am of trying to wedge the square-shaped peg of my being into the round hole of a conventional working life. Of falling short.

At the start of this blog, handing in my notice felt like the last game in town. I’d been reading Napoleon Hill’s Think And Grow Rich, an old-timey tour de force on the subtle mind-shifts necessary to improve your financial situation.

In the opening chapters, Hill gives an account of a great warrior about to pit his army against a formidable foe. After docking on enemy shores, the warrior takes the unexpected strategic gambit of burning his own ships.

Yes. Burning his own ships.

From this illustration, Hill counsels that every person who wins in any undertaking must be willing to burn his ships and cut all sources of retreat.

I shivered as I read this. There’s probably another, less risky way, I muttered to myself. More and more, though and in ways that I find hard to explain, it’s beginning to feel like the only sane option.

As Steven Pressfield writes in Turning Pro, “in many ways the passage (to turn pro, to honour your passion or gift) chooses us; we don’t choose it. We simply have no alternative.”

That was how 7UP’s email left me feeling.

That I had no alternative.

Hi James, 7UP begins, thanks for meeting with me the other day to discuss the grievance that you have submitted.

So far, so cordial.

Then on to the matter of me applying for funding to develop a new role working with the onerously disenfranchised Somali and Sudanese communities.

Any work that you decide to carry out to research and apply for funds will need to be done in your own time. What? That’s not what we agreed!

Any external bids that are submitted as part of the Council will need to be in line with business priorities, blah, blah, blah. Applications also have to comply with the Council’s funding bid regulations, including the decision making pathway.

If any new jobs are created through new external funding, they have to be filled through a fair selection process that would be managed by Community Learning Managers.

So, I’m going to begin the incredibly competitive and time-consuming process of applying for funding in my own time and, should I be successful, the job could still end up going to someone else.

Forget about ships burned. That’s mine sunk.

And there goes my source of retreat.