Just Because You're Good at Something Doesn't Mean You Should do it for a Living: Lessons Learned in a Year of Business

I was an excellent teacher.

For the past seven years, teaching has been my entire professional focus.  Even as I built Vestal Transitions, and evolved Vestal U, the core of my mission was education.

Which makes sense.  My professional life began when I was hired as a teaching associate and eventually became an Assistant Professor of English.  My friend John Walker once told me that in order to teach honorably, you must give yourself to it fully.  And I did this, to the best of my ability, for years.

I have an exceptional family.

We are unique in so many ways.  Divorced and blended, distanced and attached, kids on all edges of many spectrums.

I've worked very hard to parent my way through some pretty extraordinary circumstances.  When I left university teaching to start my own business it was for my health and the health of my family.  I couldn't parent the way I needed to and teach the way I had to simultaneously.  My excellent teaching and exceptional parenting left me nothing at the end by way of energy, or time.

Or creativity. Making the Moon Divas Guidebook healed something huge in me.

And for the first time in years I was able to own and acknowledge that I am a maker, that writing and art are essential to me.  Air, water, food, love.  

So why did I start a business without making at the core?  Where my creative energy had to continuously compete with social media, marketing strategies, ceremonies, and education?

Well, that's what I'm good at.  And these things make money.  Not much, but a little.  It's about survival, right? The above picture is of my brother's dog, Ollie.  Ollie is laughing.  She is laughing at me, at you, at any one of us who thinks we can keep living our lives in the same way, with the same mistakes and expect different outcomes.

She is laughing at every one of us who is an excellent teacher, nurse, social worker, bartender, business owner, cruise director....insert your profession here...but who doesn't LOVE that work FIRST.

See, here's the deal.  I love teaching.  But I can't give myself fully to what doesn't give back.  When I finish a class, I feel tired, drained.  

When I finish an essay or a drawing, I feel exhilarated, centered, blissful in my being.  Even if what I created was crap, the act of creating feeds me.  And I've made enough things now to know that over time creations evolve, improve, become all they need to be. "Antler Girl" by Anne Siems I'm good at a lot of things.  It's taken many years of therapy and self care and women's community to own my blessings.  All of us are good at a lot of things.  But just because you are an amazing something doesn't mean that is what you are meant to give your life energy to.

You know what you are meant to do.  Chances are you've always known.

Two weeks ago at the Moon Divas Web Weaving and Gathering in Portland (which is becoming such a great example of relaxed and organic teaching-learning community) we did an exercise where we wrote our true dream.  Ok, totally ripped off the exercise from the first season of Glee, but it is a vital one:

What is your true dream?  What do you love to do, that you have done since childhood, with ease and joy?

Mine, no surprise, is writing.  I have always been a storyteller.  I am a creator and maker and believed in myself enough to get an MFA in Fiction, to teach writing at the college level, to write a book on a subject I'm passionate about.  But why won't I allow myself to write full time?  To be guided by my own creative compass?

Why do I cloak myself in so many other professions--teacher, celebrant, consultant, coach, entrepreneur--that I cannot ever possibly find time to write in the way I must to be successful?  Why do I make myself accountable to so many others when I'm not accountable to myself?

It is, plain and simple, a form of self-sabotage. "Priestess of Delphi by John Collier I had big plans for October.  Teleconferences.  Webinars.  Promotional launches and business restructuring that had been in the works before summer began.  Some of you might remember that at the beginning of the summer I had to move.  Then, at the end, another obstacle crossed my path, one that has taken the better part of the past month to sort through.  In fact, if I revisit my attempts at educational extravaganzas, self-promotion and big launches in the past year, at every occasion I hit obstructions.  As if I were being diverted.  As if the path itself were wrong.

And finally, after so many months of uncertainty, I am willing to pause and pray for direction.

I am going "under the cloak" for a bit.  To feel in to my dream.  To ask for guidance.  To tend to my family and resolve some personal issues.  To begin making.

I don't know what this means for the future, but I feel a low hum of excitement.   Something extraordinary is already begun.  

I send love to all of you who are good at what you do but do not love it first.

May we live our imagined lives.