S1. Ep. 19 | Are you Being "Shoulded" On?

Dear listener.. who is scared. 

Stifled by walls built by you, based on other people's expectations.

 Or what you believe to be others' expectations of you. 

Agreements you have made about who “you should be” or had to be based on perceived pressures. 

Dear listener, how do I know this about you? Because I used to be you. 

For example, I went to law school not because I really wanted to be a lawyer but because writers and artists, and people with philosophy degrees were perceived as destined to be starving and without financial options. I really wanted to be a poet (the hungriest of writers of them all) and a writer, and at that very moment in college, I wanted to be a radio DJ. I’m laughing at myself now because it took me literally almost 25 years to cycle back around to be a writer and now a podcast host. My radio voice was destined to find a home.

But I had to be a lawyer first. A very miserable lawyer, I might add. A lawyer with a drinking problem to numb the feeling of an amputated soul in the transactional lack filled and adversarial environment of law firms. I got to write a lot of legal briefs and contracts but it wasn’t helping people. It definitely wasn’t helping me become abundant or joyful. It quashed my creativity which is why I drank, it made me feel dead inside because it was a suppression of myself to put myself in this box, this mask of a lawyer. And other lawyers were always telling me I was doing it wrong anyway. I laughed too much, I tried to solve problems versus giving people things they didn’t need.  

And how did I get there/here? My mom, my fiance, societal beliefs about artists, econ majors at my school, all “shoulded” on me. And I internalized that on top of all my baggage about self-worth and needing to be useful that I chose the SAFE route and went to law school. I saddled myself with massive student loan debt and a bunch of matrix programming about fixing systems from within the system.  I built a really good “duck suit” that I thought would let all of the negativity roll off.  You know how water just rolls off a duck's feathers.

My duck suit was armor - so I could keep smiling in the face of the projected onslaught of people’s problems or dramas - so I could keep on, keeping on when I left law school doomed to continue - I literally couldn’t afford to not be an attorney because I had so much debt and no other viable skills besides being an attorney (again I never looked at being a writer as an abundance producing skill). 

In fact, I never even thought I could publish my words, who would want them?  And definitely, no one was ever going to give me money for them.  I built an entire miserable and safe reality around the identity of a lawyer so that by age 26 I had chronic fatigue, a drinking problem, intimacy issues, seriously low self-esteem, digestion, and other health issues. The only joy I found was in parties and live music because I could drown out the sadness,  with the noise. 

I had no idea that none of this was real and that my prison of agreement about who and what I was, was all me making it up. 

Ok Angel, nice bummer parade you are sharing - what is your point? Where is the law of abundance here? This one is hard for me to articulate in a sound bite, so let me try to unpack it.

1. The safe route is a prison and a lie you tell yourself
2. So much of “who we think we are '' is a story built on fictions of what we believe are other people's expectations and judgments of us.  Those “shoulds” I mentioned. Those shoulds are agreements we make. ARE YOU BEING “SHOULDED” ON?
3. What agreement do you need to be yourself?
4. If you could live completely free of these agreements you believe others have put on you - what life would you choose?
5. Who are you really? And what is it you truly want to do? What brings you joy?

How do we know what is actually our reliable reality? How do we figure out, like the old me in my story, that I am living in a self-constructed pr