SELF-IMPROVEMENT

My Smile is my Compass

Day 11, 50 questions for deep self-reflection

This is day 11 of the 50 Questions for Deep Self-Reflection challenge from Know Thyself Heal Thyself created by Diana C.

DAY ELEVEN: How can you begin to clearly hear which direction your soul is calling you in and find the courage to trust it?

The Journey So Far…

This is another question that gives me a sense of peace and calm, because I know that instead of answering it as how can I, I am going to start with answering it from the perspective of how have I. Then, we’ll see if there is more I need to unpack to keep the momentum. This one will probably be significantly longer than usual.

How have I allowed myself to clearly hear which direction my soul is calling me in and found the courage to trust it?

Even knowing that I have accomplished this to some degree, it is a pretty big question. There is a part of my journey that I have alluded to or linked to previously in these daily challenges but that I have not directly addressed. This question is so utterly infused with it though that I feel I can only answer it authentically by sharing that journey. It will be an epically condensed version but it will serve the purpose.

Searching for ME

I’ve been on a massive deep-dive self-discovery journey for more than a decade including several years studying coaching and psychology. I have a few hundred hours under my belt as a life coach (I was damn good at it, but, it wasn’t my passion) and a few hundred more hours of being coached by coaches of all levels.

Side-note: There is no such thing as a bad life coach (unless they never shut up, haha). A life coach’s job is to allow you to take the jounrey and to simply ask the intuitive questions you haven’t thought of to help you expand your sphere of knowledge, pushing out that boundary of knowing what you don’t know so that you may explore. Whenever I heard another coach say, “I just can’t find a coach that pushing me further than myself,” I refused to be a client or a coach for them because I knew that they weren’t growing — I knew they weren’t allowing themselves to grow and were blaming the coach. That they were expecting the coach to do the work instead of being the guide. I didn’t want a coach or a client that was going to blame me for their outcome — I’d heard that enough in my life.

I’ve also worked with psychotherapists. All of this was to unravel the ME I couldn’t quite find. It’s a strange thing when someone says they are ‘finding themselves’ because they are right there — but I wasn’t. I was completely disassociated from my own existence (not that I knew that at the time) so the real journey and discovery were how to associate back into me. That’s what ‘finding myself’ was for me and all of the work I did only prepared me for the real work.

After years of commitment to self-growth including reconnecting with my passion for writing (and my characters who are brilliant representations of those parts of me I need to explore), I started recognizing the toxicity in the relationship with my ‘womb-without-a-view’ (my term for the mother). It took four years of working on the recognition, setting, and holding of boundaries before I reached the inevitable conclusion — I was stifled by the connection I couldn’t break. So, I broke it. That was in January. Within days, everything I thought I was supposed to be dissolved and suddenly it felt like I could be anyone. I could be my truest self. And that’s when the gender-questioning began.

Cutting off the womb-without-a-view was (and still is) the hardest thing I’ve ever done but it was also the best because suddenly, I could see. I wasn’t clouded by trying so desperately to fulfill her needs, to earn her love, to make her happy. For the first time ever, I only needed to do those things for myself.

In the quieting of the voice in my head that she gave me, I was able to hear all the others that were always me. They are clear, now. They are the callings of my soul presented as my characters. This is why writing is such an important part of who I am — because it is in the doing of what I am doing right now (writing) that I openly have the courage to trust my characters (and myself) to take me exactly where I was always supposed to go.

Anything Else?

I feel very content in writing the words above and the smile I’m wearing is evidence. I trust the characters in my soul to point me towards whichever discovery I need to make next, or whichever boundary I need to break through, or whichever belief I need to dissolve. And I trust the happiness I feel to be my guide that I am still pointing towards my true north.

My god, I sound cheesy right now. I can’t even feel bad about that because I can’t wipe the grin off my face. My gender-questioning journey so far has led me to the labels of genderqueer, non-binary, and trans-masc. With the guidance of medical professionals and my amazing gender therapist, eight days ago, I began HRT and all I can think right now is, “Is this how I was always supposed to feel? Is this sense of happiness and well-being what I’ve been missing out on my whole life?” I’m sure I’m in a euphoric phase that may not last, but, even if it is short-lived, the happiness I feel now will always be a feeling I can draw on — and one I’d never had before. I’m unbelievably grateful for that and it all came from trusting ME to put ME first!

If you are interested in the journey so far — all the days that came before, I’ve collected all the article links here:

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