To Living Freely & Truly.
Reflections on the final years of my twenties, to alchemizing the hardships into real wisdom and unlocking the secret to living freely and truly.
Dear Taylor,
It’s so good to be writing again. I can’t tell you how much I have dreaded getting back to instilling my thoughts in words, for my mind had developed a crippling notion that the art of writing has escaped from me, never to return again. And if I were to indeed sit down and pen my thoughts, it would confirm my biggest fear.
Oh, how dramatic my mind can sometimes be!
Regardless, I am glad to have a resilient soul like you walking alongside me to give me the courage to face what I’d otherwise be too timorous to do.
It has always intrigued me beyond words can describe how parallel our lives have been all these years we have known each other. While I may not be 26 anymore, I can most certainly relate with everything you’ve mentioned to be experiencing in the past four years. Perhaps, then, one can conclude that age is indeed merely a number and that life can take similar forms in different stages.
In simpler words, the beginning stages of entrepreneurship is the same for everyone regardless of their age- or at least that has been the case for us.
Having quit the online entrepreneurial rat race for over 2 years now, I can confidently say I have successfully detoxed from the toxicity of the industry and am well on my way to greener pastures and more optimistic horizons.
I can never get over the irony of “online coaches” preaching abundance, only to be instilling scarcity in their audiences’ minds. I have been part of the said audience.
It has taken me close to 2 years to heal from this and now that I have, it feels rather good to be breathing freely again. When I say freely, what I mean is that my mind no longer closes in on me, inducing fearful thoughts of failure & doom, something that it often did when I was in the thick of building my online coaching business. It no longer questions my intentions and the outcomes of my actions. Gone are the days when I’d wake up and calculate the ROI of every single action I am supposed to take, constantly be caught up in a never-ending process of strategizing my every move, reverse engineering all my intentions and only undertaking a project if it showed promise of a profit.
Talk about squeezing the life out of an artistic soul!
I am joyful to have escaped such a scarcity-infused lifestyle & even more joyous to see myself hopping over the fence to the other side, optimistic, unscathed and full of motivation to lead a lifestyle I had always intended: to live freely & truly.
These days, I am constantly asking myself what that means. To live freely. To live truly. And every time I ask myself that question I am led to only one answer: it is to simply live and find out.
I have spent so much of my time these last four years thinking my way through life and pretending that meant to be living. It was not. One can rarely think their way through life.
No.
The only way is to live through it.
Take messy action. Fail. Take messier action. Gain clarity. Lose it. Start all over again. And never, ever fixate on finding the answers, for there aren’t any- at least not really.
Life isn’t a mystery to be solved. It is an experience to be lived.
The more I heal, the more I come I understand this reality.
These days, I find myself to be loosening up my grip more and more. To not have this need to be in control; instead, let go and see where life takes you. Of course, this is easier said than done. In fact, one can argue that you can only come to such a conclusion once you've paid your dues, that is to have experienced the roughness of life, used the experience as a cure to heal your wounds and carry the scars as a set of guides to lead the way to a more aligned life.
Therefore, perhaps, we find ourselves in such rosier times due to the possibility that we have paid our dues. We have attained our set of guides that have now taken us to these lush lands we find ourselves in currently. And the only thing we should be doing is to revel in it, experience it with every atom in our being & to not fret about what’s coming next.
I don’t know about you but I am ecstatic to finally have arrived in this stage in life. As someone who is well into her early 30s, society can be a real downer, reminding us of how close we’re getting to our expiry date.
Somehow, though, I am starting to see this is only the beginning.
Despite the hardships and the pitfalls that that I faced in the final years of my twenties, the finale of the decade led me to a rather thrilling milestone, the ability to embrace curiosity fully and completely.
Not only that.
All of the triumphs, the failures, the mishaps and the reroutes that I experienced in my 20s have alchemized into a wisdom that seems so foolproof, it is fuelling my drive more than ever to pick up speed and continue on my journey to unlock more of this magical life.
I have never been so optimistic. I have never been so eager.
Above all, I have never been so curious.
So here’s to leading this new chapter with curiosity and hope and infusing every little chapter with fun and joy.
Yours ardently,
Fatima