Fearing your passions & purpose in life

 Have you ever felt like your fear your purpose in life. Like living your life in line with your purpose seems so far off from the life that you're living now, that living a life that's actually purposeful and fulfilling and sustainable and happy almost seems scary. Like you can't even begin to imagine a good life for yourself. And I don't mean an elaborate life spending money on things that you'd never care about or becoming wasteful with your money because you can or spending money purely because you have it. I mean the life that you truly deep down wan to live. Your realistic dream life. And by realistic I don't mean living inside the confines of how society has told you you need to live, I mean that in between space where you no longer see your dream life as unattainable because of how dreamy it sounds to live a life that you actually enjoy, but it seems attainable even though you're not there YET. I realise at this point I'm saying a lot of thing that seem contradictory even in my mind, but let me start from the beginning. 

We start at the point where you've been living a life prescribed to you by society. You kinda just went with the flow of what everyone else was doing and said how life is to be lived as, and now you've reached a point where you feel like something's missing. Or you feel like you can't keep up with society's standards for how you should live life, and frankly you don't care to either, or you're close to no longer caring because of how burnt out you are. Or you just feel like there has to be something more meaningful you could be doing with your time. Or maybe you just realised that you frankly don't want to do your current job for the next 40-odd years (or however many years you have left in your career or life. Somewhere or through someone you've been exposed to the idea of stepping back to think about what you want your life to really look like if you had the choice for it to be however you want it to be. And if you're anything like me, or anyone who was sucked into society's idea of how life "should be lived" then this idea of really dreaming will take some practice. At first you might not know what you actually want because you've suppressed it for so long. So you go looking for ideas from other people who are living their dream lives. Maybe you'll take some ideas from them that seem nice, but you later realise you don't care for. You might look to your childhood for ideas of what you wanted out of life before you realised bills had to be paid. Some of those ideas might stick but others you might realise you also no longer care for. If you keep going for long enough, looking to other people for ideas and reassessing them and add and taking off stuff from your list, eventually you'll get to the point where you start to see what you really want from life. 

The next step might be the hardest of all. Admitting to yourself what you want from life. Especially if you've been in denial for a long time about what you want from life, it might be hard to admit this to yourself. Especially if you realise that the path you want to take/create in your life is very different from the people that you're surrounded or influenced by. It can be hard to listen to your inner self if you're listening too much to people's opinions. But what you have to remember is that you're the one having to live your life, not the people commenting on your life. You're the one who has to be content with how you're spending your time. But anyway, it's a process, and it takes a lot of pondering and journaling and reading books and more pondering and writing down thoughts and ideas to get to the point of knowing what you want. And the process is often ongoing throughout your life, as you continue editing it. Because you might want to spend your time doing something specific with your time, but in 3 years you might feel like it's time to move onto something else. And that's okay. Life is ever evolving. 

Anyway, at some point you'll reach a mindset where you feel like you're really starting to find direction with what you're wanting to change or do in your life. And that's the point I was referring to in the beginning of this post. The point where your dream life no longer feels like someone else's life, but it starts to feel like you're making active progress towards living that. And it scares you a bit. Because it actually for once feels within reach. Possible. And the more you keep taking steps to reinforce that feeling of getting closer to your dream, the more the fear will start to disappear. But you just gotta keep pushing through and taking the necessary actions to make sure you don't stop just before you reach that place of your dream life.