cruising

As we drove north on the I-5 the other day I was watching people zoom by in their cars. Sometimes they would almost be floating next to me, each in their own private universe, unaware of my gaze and of our parallel speeds and trajectories. I saw people everywhere, buzzing along in their little worlds when we are all actually going somewhere together. Our seemingly separate movements and choices constantly affecting everyone around us, sometimes only inches from colliding.

I had been giving myself a hard time for a number of days, and as I watched the woman in the black car floating along next to our silver one, something told me it was time to give myself a break. Time to get into the habit of giving myself (and therefore the people I love...okay, my husband) a break too. I criticized him a few times that day. Granted we were locked in a car together for eight hours with our kids, but still, as I listened to the way I was correcting him or judging his actions I saw that when I just pause for a moment to love myself, then I can just love him too. I can immediately release any need for him to be other than who he is.

I was starting to see something as we barreled up the 5, about my ideas around failure. And success. There was this gnawing feeling that had been following me around that I was on the wrong path, that I had made some mistakes and bad choices, and that I should be trying to do something smarter than what I am doing right now. That being a healer is a joke. That I will never make a living that way. Never be able to support myself creatively. These thoughts had been following me around for the past couple of weeks. Weeks in which I kept noticing or running into friends who I consider “successful” female artists and I kept seeing myself as some kind of failure. Or at least of limited potential. But as the woman in the next car floated by she gave me something rich. A sense of peace I had been missing and I asked myself: What is really standing between you and believing you are a “success”?

It's so simple. All anyone who has enjoyed success has ever had to begin with was a simple uncompromising belief in what they were doing. I might have thought for a while that I'd been up against a lot in terms of my demons, but I really have no excuse anymore. I see my gifts and what to do with them more clearly than I ever have. And to cultivate that belief into something unwavering and constant I have only to make a subtle shift in my habitual thinking. I need only to catch myself every damn time and shift lanes to that trajectory of confidence. The one that finds me every morning. The one that is flying 80 miles an hour through the blighted San Joaquin Valley singing Beetles songs. The one with five lists on each desk of projects I am working on. I don’t need to drive down that dead end that I know so well. And when I find myself there, it is not that hard to notice I have gone the wrong way and turn around. Get up that ramp to the freeway again.