If You Want Something Different Than This, Become Something Different Than This or Wake Up! | By Pam Stewart

To have what you want you have to let yourself  become a person who is capable of having it.

Who you are has gotten you to the exact spot you are now.  Or, another way of putting it is, who you are is perfectly aligned with the life you have.  You have exactly what you believe is possible for yourself.  To have something else, you have to become someone else.  I see this failure to align as why so many people become depressed after winning the lottery and achieving their dreams of becoming rich and famous.

When I envision what I want for my life, I can see a clear divide between who I would need to be in order to have it and who I am now.  To have the future freedom and peace I dream of I would have to take responsibility for myself in a way I have failed to do thus far.  There is still a part of me that plays small, a part of me asking that someone else in the room be in charge, a part of me that doesn’t fully trust my abilities to ‘run the show’ (as in my life).  The reasons for this aren’t all that important (youngest child syndrome, maybe?  Victim of the patriarchy, perhaps?).  Who cares.  What matters is that now that I can see and name it, I can work on rectifying it. 

Solving the misalignments in ourselves requires asking what part of you feels safe with your patterns even when you feel dissatisfied with your life.  Like it or not, believe it or not, your patterns of self-sabotage, poor communication, lethargy, compulsive behaviours, etcetera, are the response to a need to feel safe that you are denying.  You’re not special and you’re not unique.  Maybe your circumstances and back story are yours alone, but so is everybody else’s.  Maybe you have more hurdles than your friends and thus feel disadvantaged by the steepness of the hill you have to climb, maybe you have less hurdles than your friends and thus you see yourself as having less motivation than others to change your life, but whatever story you’re telling yourself it is the same story the lucky ones received before bedtime as kids: it’s a nice trick to lull you into feeling safe and sleepy.

Wake.  Up.

Because once you see that, what your specific story is and how you are using it to guard yourself against feeling too much or being too challenged, it’s harder to act unconsciously by repeating the same patterns you have up till now.  In those moments you have a choice to make that before would have just been habitual.  That choice is what is meant by owning one’s life.  After 25 there’s no one to blame anymore.  Not your parents or your childhood.  There’s just a wonderful opportunity to accept reality and work with it to get somewhere else.  Our past is what it is, but our future is still to be determined, and we each have a say in it if we choose to get really honest about our present.