It’s Not All About You
It's not all about you.
You think it is. Perhaps not in a self-flattering way. More in the way that makes you shrink. The way that puts you in the middle of the room, under a spotlight, convinced that everyone can see every crack and gap and thing you haven't yet worked out.
This is what many of us call imposter experience. And most of us know it well.
That person who never replied to my email - it's because she doesn't like me, so my saboteur says. I have a fear of rejection so I read the world as if it is about to reject me. I make everything a referendum on me. On whether I am enough. On whether I belong here at all.
I call this the little old me. The ego, doing what egos do - putting itself in the middle of the story, either on a pedestal or in a hole.
We put ourselves in the middle, counterintuitively, because we are afraid of being seen.
And we needn’t fight our way to confidence or courage or the right kind of visibility. We need only recognise that the middle was always an illusion. Nobody is actually in it. We invented it, all of us, separately, in our own heads, and then projected it onto each other.
There is no spotlight.
There is only a fire. And a circle of people around it, each one working at the edge of the light, each of us looking inward at something larger than ourselves.
The move from imposter experience to purpose is the move from I to We.
When we find something beyond ourselves to care about - however fragile, however partial - we stop putting ourselves in the middle. We take our place at the edge of the circle. We look inwards at the fire of our longing. And our nervous system settles, because we are no longer the subject of the story, we are merely a part of it.
What we are here to do doesn't have to be grand. In fact the smaller and more specific it is, the more real it tends to be and the less we have to pretend that we have a clue. To take care of just a little corner of the world, in a particular way, with the particular gifts that are ours - that is enough. More than enough. The trouble comes when we put ourselves in the middle of it, either as the hero or the fraud. Both are the same mistake.
What's in the middle of the circle is different for each of us, and at some level it's the same. The burning world. The shared grief of a species that has forgotten its belonging. The longing for right relationship between people and the living earth. For peace and the preservation of beauty.
The greatest medicine for imposter experience is humility. Which might strike you as odd. Putting ourselves in a hole in the ground for others to pass judgement on, is not humility. Realising we are the ground, the earth itself, and we, all of us, have only a particular part to play - that is humility. Nothing special there and yet dearly beloved, as each and every flower in a garden.
We are scared of not being included. And a purpose beyond self is, paradoxically, how we save ourselves from that fear. Because in the depths of who we are, we already know that there is no separation between us and the world. Our purpose beyond self is our way of coming back to warm ourselves against that fire.
This is the move the Journey asks of people, slow, patient, sometimes difficult movement from the little old me - and the story that everything is about whether it accepts or rejects us - towards the larger We that we were always part of.
If you feel you don't have a purpose, start here. Ask yourself: what or who would immediately benefit if I got out of my own way right now?
Whatever comes - trace it. Follow it to your heart’s conclusion. Don’t think of scale and be specific. This is your light, rippling out, from a circle, with a fire and others working at the edge of the same light.
Come and sit down.