This is Why I Ignored My Own Beliefs
What you hear in the quiet of your own mind will lead you places
I’m not going to tell you in this article that all your dreams will come true.
I’m also not going to tell you that what you tell yourself is pure…
Because the truth is, we tell ourselves lots of things. Things to keep us miserable, to keep us in bliss or to keep us in chaos, to keep us “in love”, to keep us “good” people.
It’s among all of the things, all of the nonessential and meaningless things, that everything we ask for out of life whispers in comparison to those that scream.
It’s the whisper though that has this stubborn conviction. Almost as if it has its own consciousness, its own agenda.
But will we listen?
…
I think my soul spoke to me early.
Even though it took me until just recently to believe in it.
Maybe it did for you too…
And why shouldn’t it? When the raw material that is a child has been placed in front of the awe of existence and endless wisdom the world is? Isn’t it the sole desire(necessity?) of us as parents and mentors to give everything possible to the newest souls so that they may be great? That they may live a life beyond misery and with intention? That they may make the world a better place by seeking flow and connection, and minimizing stagnation and darkness?
…
I first heard my soul when I was gladly accepting(encouraging) commissions(charity) for the finest(the only) artistic(primitive) illustrations of a single individual elephant.
Drawn entirely with pencil. A raised and triumphant wrinkle-less trunk, triangle tusks, and cylinder-like, depth-denied style legs.
Anatomically perfect.
Come to think of it, it was an Indian elephant. The ones with smaller ears that roam jungles. Not one of those bumbling, floppy-eared African elephants. Easy to tell with a trained eye of course.
And my masterpieces were exactly the same…because I was that good at my craft.
This was my earliest memory where I felt like my soul had actually spoke to me. It was in sync with who I was, at that moment, surrounded by people that saw value in what I did.
I was maybe eight years old.
I was unimaginably happy, in all my moments, as an artist.
An elephant artist.
…
It didn’t happen again until I was 14.
It was my first time in a legitimate arts class. We covered every medium from chalk, to clay molding, to oil paint.
This was my heaven.
This is where I was completely me. Where people saw me for what I was. It was the place where even if my work was complete shit, I wasn’t ashamed of it. It only made me focus harder on it.
I loved the obsession of overcoming flaw and creating something no one else could.
That is the purest definition of art: Focus that takes no discipline, value that needs no validation.
And I felt it.
…
As the years passed and I graduated high school, moved out with friends, got a job, and went to trade school, my soul whispered to me again. It spoke more desperately, more faint.
I was anxious about my life. The repetition of every day that passed going to a construction site, ended in a compounding distaste for what I was doing.
Yet, I ignored it.
Why?
Fear. Disbelief.
A voice, not my own saying, “You must suffer.”
…
I applied to art school.
I sent in a portfolio.
And I got a call from the institute with their interest in me.
I turned it down because….$90k.
And I repeated that process two more times in the next 5 years.
…
My twenties came with deafening cries of responsibility and ‘making a living’, while my soul got suppressed into silence.
And it didn’t come back until I was almost 30. I was brought into reality about how dark and desperate you become when love leaves you.
Heartbreak really hurts a man…
But it doesn’t hurt him because of his loss.
I think it hurts because of his guilt. The fact that he knows that he didn’t play his part, he was too cold, too stubborn, too apathetic, too within himself, and too unwilling to just exist with his partner.
It was my soul that got me back on my feet and kept me alive.
Here’s the thing:
Somewhere in there between the adorable Indian elephants and the art school, my father and I had an instrumental moment that was more epic to me, and a trivial memory for him.
He doesn’t remember it at all.
The point isn’t that my dad crushed my soul.
It’s that I did.
I allowed it to happen.
Because I, at that moment, all the way into my 30’s when I blamed him for it, decided that what I believed about myself was a fairytale.
All because my dad who only got to see me for a month every summer, who lived on the edge of poverty, who was stressed by a toxic family, who had bad relationship after bad relationship, who never got to see his firstborn son except in the summer…verbally threatened me in the most minute moment. One that:
made me feel that I had no choice to be myself
life was sad and insufferable
stress and undesirable work is the reality
happiness and peace are lazy things
It was this(assuming I’ve made sense of my own personal trauma) that made the belief in myself dissolve.
It was this that gagged and caged my soul.
And I had to take a movement to face what this was and do the uncomfortable:
…
For whatever reason, the arts have always fascinated me. Illustration, architecture, literature, cars, blacksmithing, sculpture, and Mother Nature herself.
But an industrious world, technology, and a demanding society living at lightning speeds cause us to forget about what matters most.
We convince ourselves that what we believe about who we are is a fairytale. That the soul, even if we have it, we don’t have time for.
…
There’s something we all need to understand about ourselves:
The soul is a whisper among clamoring, emotional voices. Lost behind insecurity, impatience, and social expectation.
The soul is something that comes bubbling up into our being from an unknown source. It exists without motivation and seduction. It’s energy that reverberates out of the same necessity that the heart beats.
The soul comes from an individually unique place of fascination and love fueled by some element of the outside world we can’t let go of.
The soul never stops whispering if you keep listening for it…
And belief, the belief we have about ourselves, that separates us from everything else in the world, is the language of the soul.
…
I don’t ignore my soul anymore.
I seek it out.
Among all the obnoxious thoughts, short-term lust, and irrational reactivity I have, I search for silence.
Silence where I can hear it speak.
Because I know that if I give it its space and do artistic work whether in writing or my other art forms, it will lead me to where I want to go:
Every day as myself.
And that’s how dreams, quite possibly, could come true.
…
Where does the soul come from?
What is it doing?
Is it there for purpose, success, or just satisfaction?
Comment what you think.
Truth and Love, Reader.