Are they worth it?
A question that new clients (who want to make changes in their life but it’s also scary) sometimes ask me is, “If I do make these big changes (that I hope will be positive but there are no guarantees), will it be worth it?”
It will absolutely be worth it. I can’t guarantee what it will look like, but if you’re genuinely on a path that is really deeply trying to figure out yourself and trying to do it in a way that’s healthy (not just a backlash reaction), it will absolutely be worth it.
It will be worth it over, and over, and over again, because what you create in the end is better than anything you can possibly imagine right now.
It will be rough, and there will be moments that you will hurt, and there will be hard things, and it will involve a lot of trying to figure out stuff that you’ve never had to deal with before, and there’s going to be heartache and struggle, but it will absolutely be worth it. It will be worth it over, and over, and over again, because what you create in the end is better than anything you can possibly imagine right now.
Because the possibilities that you can see, that you can imagine, are constrained by the limits of the information that you have available to you at the present moment. When you expand that information, the possibilities expand along with it.
Like in the book “The Giver” by Lois Lowry: Jonas starts seeing red in a monochrome world. He’s never seen red before, and he doesn’t know what it is or how to describe it. He’s just like, “This apple changed, and I have no idea how it just changed.” He doesn’t have words for color because it wasn’t in his previous existence. Then he starts seeing other colors, they didn’t exist before in his world either and his world expands to include these new possibilities.
A personal example
For another example, one that is closer to home. If you had told me eight years ago that I would be a life coach, talking to people for a living on purpose and actually liking it (that I would get energy from these interactions), I would have thought you were trying to mess with me honestly. I had done jobs involving people before (I was a teacher, worked in childcare, and then sales), but I was heavily masking, it was constantly draining me. And I didn’t have to deal with people’s personal lives, I didn’t know how to do that, really.
But after I spent several years heavily unmasking and working through a lot of really hard stuff, and learning healthier ways to be myself around people, and learning to feel safer with other people, and communicating better, and letting go of trying to communicate in neurotypical ways: People started coming to me with their personal problems, and wanting my advice, and that evolved over a few years to what it is now.
I could not have imagined this eight years ago. It wasn’t in my range of possibilities at that time. And it is so much better than anything that I was imagining back then, even in my most hopeful, positive moments.
I’m not an outlier case or a fluke. I’ve helped many other people go through this and heard stories of so many other people who have. If you’re genuinely working through things to build a healthier, unmasked life: I won’t pretend that it won’t be hard, it will, but it will be so worth it. I would do it over, and over, and over again.
I hope that you have a neurowonderful journey of your own. Take care.
