It’s easy for me to get things done by myself. To power through, to not count on anyone, to not ask for permission. To just take action, accountable only to myself. Most of my great stories all start that way. A lifetime of relying on myself has made me who I am.
Now I’m seeking new challenges in places that are not easy for me.
What made me who I am, and what I’m capable of was created from a sad place. My father was abusive, my mother suffered from debilitating (undiagnosed) depression, leaving her in bed much of the time. As a young child, there was no help for me. I was on my own.
I struggled in school, for reasons I didn’t understand, because no one was there to help me. Not a teacher, not my parents. I was ashamed of myself, as a young person trying to figure this out on my own.
This is a terrible lesson to learn from your parents, but it formed me.
I learned never to ask permission. There was no point. Or I risked an angry response. So I just took action.
No one is coming to help me, so I learned to help myself.
I walked into a store at age 12 to ask for a job (and got it by not accepting no for an answer).
I left home (and moved to another city) at age 18, never looking back.
I endured incredible hardships, was homeless for 2 years (never letting anyone know), as I tried to create something from nothing as a DJ spinning new music to an audience that had never heard it before.
I dealt with the fall-out of police and authorities investigating me, the stress of having the police bang on my door while I laid in my bed with my covers over me as I ignored them, being front page news, without asking for help from anyone. My parents didn’t even know what was going on, and I was in my early 20s, a relative kid, alone in the world.
I succeeded in the face of incredible adversity, because adversity was all I knew.
Only now, all these years later, and with the benefit of some therapy have I learned that what I experienced was not “normal”.
“Do today what you did yesterday, get today what you got yesterday” is a favorite quote of mine.
Well, I know exactly how to do what I did yesterday and I know exactly what it will get me today.
I want to challenge myself, so what is left is to do it another way.
What becomes possible if I don’t lean on my self-reliance so much? What can be done with the help of others?
And I have to admit that I don’t even know what “Help” is.
The worst thing you can ask me is “How can I help you?” because I have no idea. That is an alien thought to me.
So I’m giving myself the entire next year to figure that out.
To learn to accept help, to learn how people can help me, to learn what it’s like to not be so self-reliant and explore what becomes possible from that place.
And that scares me.
So I know I’m onto something.
Where does your next challenge lie and how can you use fear as your compass to let you know that is the exact thing to do?
