Sharing My Story

So… you know I find it almost impossible to “share my story”.*
Which is unfortunate, because I feel very much this is what needs to happen.

* I only just noticed: this is the second post inspired by Therese’s work! See? Sharing your story inspires other people. (doesn’t make it any less scary, though)

Working with it

I let out my anger by “talking” (also known as “rant-writing”, also known as “getting the conversation in your head out of your head”), like this:

I’m scared, OK!?
Because, you see, unlike YOU, person who only exists inside my head, *I* have had it real tough. No, much tougher than *YOU*. Much tougher than you can imagine.
I can’t just go and “share my story” and talk about unicorns and rainbows. I cannot talk about success because all I’ve experienced in my adult life is failure. Failure after failure after failure. Do you have ANY idea what that can do to a person’s soul? Well, I tell you what it can do: CRUSH IT.
So now I’ve discovered this idea of following your heart because even if nothing works, much like nothing has ever worked in my life, then at the very least I will be following my heart and I will be able to say “I followed my heart”. Unlike trying to do things “by the book”, the same book *you* used, but which led YOU to success, and employment and money.
I followed that same book and it led me to nothing but misery and failure. Do you have any idea how heartbreaking this is? To know that there’s this ONE BOOK everyone is supposed to follow, but which, OOPS A DAISY!, fails some people, who go on to feel like FAILURES their ENTIRE LIVES, while those people like YOU who SUCCEED go on to feel like SUCCESSES and go and make their parents proud and have lives that WORK.

Doing this helped.

And now I was ready to try something else.

Using someone else’s story as a “crutch”

I was listening to this interview from “The Year of Enough”. Therese Schwenkler talked to Srini Rao, on life and entrepreneurship (preview audio).
And he shared some of his own journey, which kinda looked like mine.

I’ve transcribed some of it here.

Srini Rao: “You start to see the world differently, and I didn’t really have a choice. Because the way I was viewing the world wasn’t working. The results weren’t “average”, they were suboptimal”.
“getting fired from every job that you had, there’s clearly something wrong”

I didn’t have a choice either. One day I looked around and I was 28 years old, unemployed, homeless, and having just escaped an abusive relationship.
Something was very, very wrong. I didn’t know what it was, but this rather… “extreme” set of circumstances gave me the final push towards considering different ways to see the world.
Because something had to change.

I too have been fired from every job I had. (Well, almost. I left my cleaning job on my own. The one that “supported” me through University.)

Srini Rao: “For 10 years I had had certain decisions, certain thoughts and certain actions and all of those combined brought me to the point of being 30 years old, having no money in the bank account and living at my parents’ house”

This was pretty much me last “summer”. By which I mean last month. I moved in with my parents in Buenos Aires, Argentina, because, yep: no place to live, and no money.
It turned out to be exactly what I needed, but how I got there? Traumatic.

Divider

OK. I’ve shared some of my story. And using Srini Rao’s personal journey really helped.

If you want, you can try doing something similar using my story.

Next post: Srini’s “map vs compass” concept. It’s really, really good! Stay tuned.

Share if you dare!

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