"What do you want to do with your life?"
Ugh. Literally the most terrifying question in the human language.
And probably the most over-thought.
What you need to do is to pay attention to the moments in your life where your heart skips a beat, where you have the mad giggles, where you're working and the hours are flying by, where you can't stop won't stop because it just feels so good. What makes you feel like that when you're stone cold sober? What knowledge do you want to shove messy fistfuls of into your brain until it dribbles down your chin? What activity makes you want to dance the night away in your own happy little world? What subject can you never talk enough about?
THAT's what you do with your life. Not the things you think you "should" do.
Listen, not everything I do makes me feel like that all the time. But I needed the memory of that joy and delight to keep me going when the going got tough. Honestly, that is what kept (keeps) me going through the lockdown, for instance. When I was working full time while remote-schooling a 5 year old. When my other special needs kid screamed at the top of his lungs constantly.
I also feed my brain little beautiful morsels. A coding tutorial here. An illustration there. To remind myself. To connect myself back to my little-kid awe. That feeling of the explorer. Of boundaries yet untested. Oh my god, sometimes I just see a cool little hover animation or something and it kind of wells me up. Like, I fall in love with the individual key frames. That's just me.
People remind me of the joy of living too. I am probably five minutes away from meeting you and instantly loving you, instantly feeling that there's something brilliant, unique, and special about how you create your art.
How many micro-hit reminders of the joy of living can you sprinkle around for yourself in your daily life?
Love,
Cathy
P.S. Latest Save the Darlings progress here.