This is the 52nd, and penultimate, blog post for Warrior by Day in its current form.
Throughout 2022 and 2023 I did a lot of journaling, vision-boarding and introspection. I knew I needed a change in my life. I was busy but did not feel impactful. I was working too many hours on things that were part of someone else’s vision.
I had a constant nagging voice, one that I’d had for more than 20 years, telling me that there was something more for me.
The voice would get loud at times, but more often than not I would find distractions to drown it out. I would justify why I couldn’t make a change or try something new and scary/exciting or get out of my comfort zone.
My excuses included,
“I don’t have enough experience to do that,”
“I need to go get another degree if I want to do that,”
“No one cares about this (topic/project/idea) other than me,”
“I can’t make money doing that,”
“I will disappoint others in my life if I choose to do ‘that,’”
“I won’t be successful,”
“I will fail,”
“I don’t have anything unique to offer that hasn’t been done by others, and they all do it better than I could do it.”
Age, infertility, survival of abuse, “failed” relationships, a circuitous career path, imposter syndrome, fear of failure and, most importantly, ignoring that voice in my head for far too long, came to a head on a beach walk mid-2022.
I had been re-reading Victor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” and wound up in a conversation with another fan of this work who reminded me of the powerful quote, “the question is not what can I expect from life, but what can life expect from me?”
This was a powerful re-frame moment. We are all in charge of our own lives, our decisions, our direction, our thoughts, our actions.
Yet we put ourselves in positions for others to take the wheel. We feel helpless, stuck, no longer aligned with our beliefs, values, or the activities and people we would rather choose to spend most of our time on, if not for our “responsibilities.”
I’m not naive enough to think that we can all just quit our jobs or shirk the daily responsibilities that make life comfortable or even survivable (if we are lucky enough to have those things accessible in the first place).
But it is a powerful reclaiming to recognize that we do have choice, even if those alternative choices don’t seem completely appealing.
We also have the ability to break free from those distractions and excuses listed above, the things that keep us in a current without a visible exit.
I’m picturing the sea turtles in Finding Nemo as I write that line –
Crush: Okay. Squirt here will now give you a rundown of proper exiting technique.
Squirt: Good afternoon. We’re gonna have a great jump today. Okay, first crank a hard cutback as you hit the wall. There’s a screaming bottom curve, so watch out. Remember: rip it, roll it, and punch it.
Rip it, roll it, and punch it.
Sometimes it’s the only way to get out of a current that is pulling us too fast and potentially in the wrong direction.
On my vision board I had a number of different things, ideas, a list of my values and my innate talents, and passions including travel, women’s health, helping/coaching others, and writing.
Writing has been a word on the whisper of that nagging voice for years.
I started writing terrible poetry when I was in 6th grade. Real doom-and-gloom stuff. My teacher at the time asked if I ever thought about writing something “happy.” I rejected that suggestion and continued with my flair for the dramatic.
I journaled throughout high school, mostly in cryptic prose that disguised the abusive “relationship” with my gymnastics coach. These journals were used decades later as evidence in the trial that put him in jail for 10 years.
In graduate school I studied physiology. Science was always something I knew I wanted to do as a profession. But even in that time period the whisper of writing reappeared. A faculty member in the journalism department at the university I attended ended up participating in one of our research studies. After many conversations about writing and feeling a renewed interest in the topic, he suggested I take a couple journalism courses as electives.
This was probably the best decision I made during my graduate school years. I learned to how to receive and give constructive feedback, was humbled and also encouraged, but most importantly I was able to be my authentic self and write about topics that had been, as the “kids” these days are saying, “living rent-free in my head” for decades.
When I left that program the professor said to me, “no matter what you do in life, Danielle, KEEP WRITING.”
I never forgot that advice, but I didn’t consistently follow it either.
The turn of events that led to me taking a “sabbatical” in 2023 opened up that channel again. I had a lot of ideas for what I wanted to do next in my life and career, but I didn’t know where to start and still had a lot of fear about failing or not having enough “experience” to try any of these other ideas.
In the spring of 2023, during the fifth year of our fertility failures, I decided I wanted to turn away from my sadness around infertility and towards helping others who were also struggling. I reached out to a non-profit I had been following to see how I could become a volunteer. Without any prompting on my part, the leader of the organization asked if I would be interested in writing a piece for their quarterly magazine. My vision board was working.
Putting that piece together and then hitting “send” was one of the scariest things I’ve done in my life. But I knew that if my story could help even one person then it would be worth the fear and the worry about being judged.
The response was overwhelming and encouraging. That piece became the most read article of 2023 for the non-profit’s magazine.
It wasn’t about getting a metric to validate my writing, it was about me finally understanding that writing was an important part of my life and I was ready to share more of it, in the hopes that it could help others.
For all of those fears of lacking the “experience” to obtain a different role/job/career/degree, what I realized is that the experience of my life is a credential in and of itself.
And I accumulated more life experience in the summer following that first public piece of writing. Several months later I was finally pregnant after over five years of failing to conceive, but the pregnancy was fraught with scares and uncertainty–an early bleed I was certain was a miscarriage, then the waiting to hear the heartbeat to confirm the fetus was still viable, then a brief honeymoon followed by inconclusive test results that required months of series of tests, including an amniocentesis, to determine once again if the fetus was viable.
For nearly five months of the pregnancy I was still in a gray zone and needed to write daily just to keep my head straight. That writing was all for me, but I also knew that it could potentially help someone in my situation someday in the future.
Once we knew what was going on with the baby, and that we would still have some uncertain but workable challenges, I directed my attention back towards my personal goals.
It wasn’t the time for me to start an independent business venture such as becoming an executive or leadership coach, but I could start putting some of my own self-growth learnings from my own circuitous life journey out into the world.
I taught myself (via YouTube vidoes) how to put a WordPress site together to host my intended blog. It took me FOREVER to get that damn website up and running and I could have kept tweaking and making it more functional but I knew that I would fall victim to my procrastinating tendencies and use them to avoid just doing the thing that needed to be done.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.
And, rip it, roll it, crush it.
I re-posted my fertility article as the first step to get myself rolling and to get comfortable with putting myself out there with a website/bio etc.
I made the conscious decision not to look at any metrics for the website, and to this day I have no idea how many people have viewed any of the 52 articles I’ve posted, nor have I counted the “likes” on any of my social media posts where I launched each weekly article.
I truly do not care.
As I mentioned in one of my recent blog posts, this experiment wasn’t really for anyone but me. I needed to prove to myself that I could get over the fear of being seen, judged or ridiculed so that I could keep the promise to myself that I would use my life’s challenges and missteps to help others feel less alone.
When I wrote the first “new” post after I had re-posted the fertility article I was terrified.
The website was not perfect, and I had people tell me all about what was wrong with it and what I should do about it. I told them politely, “thank you, but I really don’t want to spend my time on optimizing the website. It’s not in my wheelhouse and would take too much time away from actually writing.”
(I did eventually hire someone to smooth out some of the kinks, which was also a good decision and allowed me to do the part that I really needed to do…which again, was just to keep writing.)
The blogs themeselves were not perfect, and they were/are long. No one reads long-form writing anymore. I was told by someone who was truly trying to help me that I should change my style–make it shorter, put bullet points (TLDR-style) up front so people know what the key takeaways are.
I even had a couple people tell me they should be guest writers on my blog. I told them they were welcome to do so, but they’ve never taken me up on it.
None of these suggestions were bad ideas, but I had no interest in changing direction as I knew it would only distract me from “shipping the creative work” (Seth Godin).
And quite frankly, for all the people telling me how I should change what I was doing, none of them were actually doing anything at all to put themselves out there. These are friends of mine, well-intentioned, but they are not in the arena, so I just kept moving forward on my own path.
I stood my ground. I am not here for the masses. I am here for whoever needs it and is meant to see it.
I know the writing isn’t perfect. I made it a point not to take days or weeks to write a piece. I’ve always been a stream-of-conscious writer and this blog is no different.
My husband came up with the idea to name the weekly posts “Warrior Wednesday,” after I posted the first blog on a Wednesday. This was a good idea that I took–it held me accountable to creating one post a week.
It has been a year, and I have not missed a Warrior Wednesday post. THIS, I am counting, no other metric than holding myself accountable to be consistent without trying to be perfect.
I typically write the post the night before but sometimes life gets away from me and I have to write it the day of (Wednesday). It takes me on average a couple hours to write, upload and post a social media intro. The only rule I have for myself is it has to get done before 11:59 p.m. so it “counts.”
I had one post that was put out at exactly 11:59 p.m. I was sweating. (I’m competitive)
I have written these posts all over–in the hospital room the night before I was induced to deliver our baby, in the backseat of a car, driving back from vacation at 10:00 p.m. while trying to settle a crying kid in the car seat next to me while my husband drove, in a spare bedroom of my parent’s house where I snuck away from a family 4th of July gathering to make sure I didn’t break my streak, in hotel rooms while traveling for work once I started a new job, on our annual vacation in Acadia National Park, in the thick of many sleepless nights and days during the newborn phase, and countless times in front of the computer while pumping breastmilk.
Coming from a time where I thought I was going to have a free-and-easy sabbatical and I’d be traveling the world, working on entrepreneurial endeavors, to spending that time period pregnant and now 10 months post-partum, writing this blog every week and keeping the commitment to myself was one of the few ways I was able to anchor into a part of me that was here long before my professional career or my newly-built family.
Writing has always been a part of me and it has felt so good to honor it in a very scary way that challenged me to step out of my comfort zone and truly not give a FUCK about the outcome.
This experiment has freed me in ways that have opened up channels in my brain to “dare greatly” and not worry so much about “when things fall apart.”
With all of that said, I have some new ideas that I have started to pursue and want to focus on now. I would never have had the courage to go after these other ideas had I not primed my courage to try without fear of failure by putting my heart and soul on these pages each week.
If there’s anybody out there reading this, thank you for listening and I hope you found something that helped you feel less alone and more empowered to take control of your life, follow your passions, listen to your SELF first and pay it forward.
See you next week for one more Warrior by Day wrap-up session and a peek into what’s next for this loquacious literary warrior.