After a good few years of journeying, reflecting, learning and healing I feel like I’ve recently come out of a fog.  All the insecurities and life stuff that I got sick to avoid have started presenting themselves to me now that I have the resources to deal with them.

One particularly triggering story to come out of the archives is the one about ‘success in my career’.  Yes, I know, mega-bleugh.  But now that I can hold my emotions with experience and empathy, instead of cowering in terror at the prospect of it, I allowed myself to take a deep look into the pieces that make up this humdinger story.

Cause damn, why is it so painful?

Well, from a young age, I (along with, you know, EVERYONE) was spoon fed the belief that an awesome ‘successful’ career is the shiny awesome reward for growing up.

And I am not the success story I envisioned when I was young.  I’m 33, I don’t have a job that pays me money from someone who isn’t my dad. I don’t own a house or a car. I don’t have a boyfriend or a baby or a novel in the works that would supposedly ‘balance out’ my woeful job status. By society’s standards, I have a sorrowfully unsuccessful career (/life).

But what are society’s standards?

Or more accurately, who is society’s standards?

Is ‘society’ not just an internalized system of beliefs and thoughts innocently created by the child-ego mind to keep us safe and approved of?  A patchwork of random ideas picked up from childhood to create our world.  Ideas that are reinforced as our linear, rational left brain searches endlessly to prove that our world is real, that we are safe, that we are real.

Society exists nowhere but in our own (ingenuously childish) minds.  Like for real.

And, if this is the case, then holy shit, for me, a successful career looks like a super weird amalgamation of someone with a briefcase and my dad’s side parting and a 90’s romcom where I run around New York with a coffee enduring a string of hilarious mishaps until my raucous but fair boss finally recognizes my quirky talent and I get to run my story in Fashion magazine.

Or I get a quirky but raucous dog who runs away to the laundromat where I serendipitously run into a man with one of my gloves who ends up being the love of my life.

Or, through a hilarious string of mishaps, the fair but quirky boss of the laundromat becomes a dog who ends up being the love of my life after we travel forward in time in a closet.

All the while there’s faxing and The Big Presentation that I ace (after almost losing the Important Document).

My mind doesn’t even see the movie either, just the trailer.

To this song:

My brother’s (who is now an artist) childhood career success icon is Peter Panning from Hook, the high flying (pun intended) lawyer with the mobile phone (in 1994!) pre-remembering he’s Peter Pan.

One of my friends and her sister grew up believing the pinnacle of career success is being a cream-pantsuit clad single mom a la Michelle Pfeiffer in One Fine Day.

I mean whaaat?! This is what that sweet, young and unfulfilled part of me thinks a successful career looks like. So OF COURSE she’s going to feel depressed at my current state.   And oh wow when I look at it like this I feel such loving compassion for her.

This is a dream I held onto so tightly for so long that it became part of the fabric of who I thought I was.

I don’t need to push it away, I certainly don’t need to use it as misdirected motivation to try harder to be ‘successful’ in a wildly outdated way.  The unfulfilled ache that floods me when I think the word ‘career’ is the sadness of a loss of an innocent dream that is asking to be grieved.

Nothing more, nothing less.

Can I give her the space, hold her gently as she grieves like a child grieves the loss of a toy?  From my place of resourced maturity, I know that it was a toy she outgrew and I do not get swept away by her grief, I can fully honour it with gentle compassion.

And oh man, when I do this…

…a door opens into a new crazy amazing space, unbound by expectation, so loving.

Open open open, fresh to this moment.

A space of softness and presence where the unbearable childhood weight, projections and demands of the term ‘career’ are rendered meaningless.

A boundless new opening where success is defined as nothing but the intention to do something and then doing it.

And I am suddenly shown the infinite ways I am successful.

Fuck me, I am successful.  I made breakfast, I washed my face, I walked to the loo, I typed an email.

I see that these are not small things.  These are the only things.

Success happens in presence, whether I am putting on pants or talking to my (dad) boss- it happens in this moment, only this moment.

And in this moment, everything weighs the same.

Sweet, soft presence is the reality that lives between the archaic movie trailers spinning the expectations I had placed on myself.

In reality I cannot fail, I can only be.

Expansively, beautifully, successfully me.