30 October 2007
Introduction
I didn't always hold the view that it’s a magical world. It’s
safe to say that my life has been a swinging pendulum where I first tried out
cultural norms and then, after evaluating their effectiveness, began to swing
in the other direction. That is, I began to form my own norms.
There was a breaking point, really, that stopped the
momentum in one direction and turned it to another. I wrote about it a few
years ago for a career planning website for artists. I’m including it in this
introduction because I think it will help anyone who is experiencing
disappointment with his/her efforts to be a fine, morally upstanding person. It
will also shed some light on my point of view and why I write what I write. Here’s
the article in slightly modified form:
Shredding
by Samantha Standish
I admire people who are
unabashedly themselves. The people I look up to are the ones that fit no particular
stereotype of how a person is supposed to look, be or act, and yet these people
believe they’re wonderful beings. They come in all sizes, colors and
ethnicities. Some can’t balance their checkbooks. Some don’t have checkbooks.
Some overindulge. Some underindulge. Some are loud and obnoxious, and some are
quiet and sweet. It doesn’t matter to me. They all have a quality that I envy:
They like themselves. Consequently, they like the world too.
Liking myself has been a work in progress. For no good reason, I spent the
first forty years of my life believing I wasn’t perfect. And yet, I thought
perfection was the goal. So, I spent a lot of time trying to become perfect. I
thought a good person was a person who “improved” him, or her, self, and I
wanted to be a good person. I thought a good person tried to please his, or
her, parents, friends and social institutions, so I tried to do just that. It
never occurred to me to question why I thought I had to be a good person in the
first place, or why I didn’t think I was a good person already, or why other
people’s ideas were more important than my own happiness and freedom. I had
just swallowed cultural norms without ever examining them.
Because I never questioned my assumption, I worked hard throughout those first
forty years, trying to validate myself through the approval of others. I acquired
honors and graduated top ten percent of my high school class. “See,” I said in
so many words, “I’m a good person!” I gathered more honors in college and
graduated, again, in the top ten percent of my class. “See,” I said, “I’m a
good person!” In law school that followed, I earned prestigious clerkships and
honors and, once again, graduated in the top ten percent of my class. “See,” I
said, “I’m a good person!”
Desperately, I tried to earn my worth. I was hired by interesting, morally
sound, companies, advanced quickly and made good money, and all of this was
used as a measuring stick to make sure I was doing what I was supposed to be
doing to be a good person. I was always looking outside myself for confirmation,
and it was always a disappointment. No matter how well I did, no matter how
many compliments I got, I wasn’t happy with the results, and I couldn’t figure
out why. I was doing everything right, wasn’t I? Why wasn’t it working? Why
wasn’t I happier? I had nothing to complain about. I had the world’s best
family, a great job, working with nice people, making good money and yet, at
one point, I was coming home every night crying. Something was wrong, and it
wasn’t anything outside of myself. It was me, and I knew it.
One day, it struck me why I wasn’t content. It was a little thought, but it
packed a punch. Here it is: I didn’t believe I had a right to exist unless I
was of service to someone else. All my actions proved it. I was always trying
to produce a result, as if being me wasn’t enough. I believed I had to prove my
right to exist by producing something that could be measured, and even then it
was a sketchy endeavor because the underlying idea—that I wasn’t good
enough—was always there urging me on to the next proof. I could never rest on my
laurels, because I would always need to be filling a gap that could not be
filled. I was unhappy because, without knowing it, I was being unkind to
myself. This realization was both liberating and like having cold water thrown
in my face. It was as if I was waking up, but abruptly.
I knew I had to change everything I was doing. I resigned from the bar. This
meant I could never practice law again. I had used getting a law degree to try
to prove my worth. I had also used making money as a way to prove my worth. I
stopped working altogether. This had some pretty severe financial repercussions and left my family and friends bewildered.
Hadn’t I worked hard to get where I was? Why would I abandon it all? Despite
the confusion, I knew that no matter what the consequences, I could not be a
person who works to prove her worth ever again. I had to draw the line even if
it wasn’t done with tremendous grace, and even if it meant that in the eyes of
those I loved, I was not behaving responsibly.
About six months later came the shredding. I grew up in a surf town where to
shred means to excel. That fits this scenario quite nicely. I took out my box
of degrees, awards, certificates, evaluations, resumes, and every other form of
“accomplishment” I had—and I had piled up a mighty amount of documentation to
prove my worth—and I shredded all of it. It took several days to make it to the
bottom of the box, and I burned out a shredder.
As I went through each item, I saw it from a completely new perspective. For
me, these weren’t things to be proud of, as I had thought. These were really
commentaries from other people telling me that I now had permission to feel
good about myself. I kept thinking the same things over and over as I examined
each sheet: What if I never received any of these pieces of paper? What if
no-one liked me or my work (which were synonymous in my mind)? Would I be just
as valid?
Even after a lifetime of training that said you have to earn your way in the
world, I couldn’t believe that a piece of paper, no matter what it said, could
validate another person’s being, skill, potential or right to engage in an
activity. It was a piece of paper. Every single bit of what I shredded came
down to one thing: another person’s opinion. I had based my life on trying to
meet other people’s expectations, much of it in the form of educational
institutions.
The process of mental and physical house cleaning continued. I dumped entire
photo albums. I donated books. I got rid of everything that didn’t feel good
and that I wasn’t actually using right now. What I found was a lot of freedom.
I realized that I didn’t need much to live, and even less to be happy. In fact,
contrary to the advertising, when I had the essentials around and nothing more,
I was content.
I think the reasons I
pursued my educational, and career, goals is not unusual. Most of the people
I’ve met throughout my life have been trying to prove their worth in one way or
another, and this is entirely unnecessary.
Take it from me, you’re as worthy as you’re ever going to get right now. No
matter what. It doesn’t matter if you’re the smartest person on earth or the
dumbest.
You’re worthy.
It doesn’t matter if you’re
a prodigy or a talentless hack.
You’re worthy.
It doesn’t matter if you have trillions of dollars or none.
You’re worthy.
It doesn’t matter if you’re in peak physical condition or very
ill.
You’re worthy.
It doesn’t matter if
everyone loves you or no-one loves you.
You’re worthy (and there’s always someone
who loves you—you just may not know about them).
***
The lesson here, for me, was that you can’t do
anything to become worthy. The idea that you have to prove your validity
is faulty in and of itself. It’s a never ending circle that leads to no
particular destination. Instead, a more solid foundational idea is that your
value is the fact that you exist. Knowing that, subscribing to it, choosing
that idea, in my opinion, is the first step to creating magic because it enables
you to make conscious choices about your life and what you want to experience.
It opens up infinite possibilities. And that’s what this blog is all about.
Samantha Standish is a writer and a former intellectual property and corporate law lawyer. She received her B.A. in history with honors, and her B.A. in Spanish with honors, in 1989 from the University of California, Santa Barbara and went on to get her law degree Cum Laude from the University of Maine School of Law. In her legal career, Samantha worked in government and the private sector, most notably in the financial planning and software industry. In her personal life, she’s been married for twenty years and has a fifteen year-old home schooled son. Samantha resigned from the bar in 2005 and has devoted herself to bridge writing (making complex ideas about space/time easy to understand for the average reader) ever since, focusing mostly on self-help articles for artists and writing bridge books on the side. In her words, “The first forty years of my life were fact finding; the next forty years are about applying, expanding and exploring what I’ve learned.” Her books can be found at samanthastandish.com. Samantha’s NWV blog is titled The Magical Life.