the trouble with fear
I worked with a client a couple of years ago in a corporate job in San Francisco that she downright, no bones about it, hated.
It paid great. She was saving some serious cash; in the years she worked there she made enough money to buy nine (count ‘em, nine) multi-resident rental properties in the neighboring city, as well as live well, travel, go out to eat, etc.
She had all this and a fantastic partner that she got along with like peas and carrots.
And yet, every Tuesday evening when we’d have our session, more often than not she’d be laid out on the couch, hiding under a pile of blankets, earbuds in, eye pillow tied on, using all available bandwidth to counteract the soul suckingness of her job. Sometimes she’d lie there for thirty minutes before our session, just to gather the wherewithal to answer the phone.
All she wanted was to be done, to leave her crazy boss and that coworker that drove her bananas and go cozy up in a cabin in the hills and never leave.
Many weekends found her and her partner staying in little b&bs and rentals in the country. Her soul sang. Everything in her said yes.
The very ravens swooped down and tapped her on the shoulder ‘stay friend, you belong here.’ The fish nosed the mirror surface of the pond where she sat all Saturday afternoon, wrapped in tartan with a hot water bottle tucked in her lap, swishing their fins at her, beckoning her to settle in for the winter.
And then, the dreaded trip back to the city on Sunday evening, every ounce of her body braced in refusal, the commute to work an endured drudgery, the ever looming year-end bonus luring her deeper into that fur lined trap.
She wanted so badly to quit it all and just sit in absolute stillness for about a thousand years, the stars wheeling light years overhead and the rocks sifting to sand at her feet.
But the money. Oh the money. What in the world would happen if she just quit? Would she be ok? Would her partner be supportive? What would her family think?
Does this story stir up something in you? Is there something that calls to you, calls to your very soul, but you are terrified to answer because of the thousand ‘what ifs’ and ‘gotta figure out firsts’? Drop a line and talk about it!
