How to Figure Out What You Want with Your Life
If by age 30 you still don’t know what you want with your life, you are screwed. Right? Wrong.
We often like to think that our purpose in life is fixed and finite. It’s not.
Or at least from what I have learned in my own life.
Knowing what you want to do with your life is not always something that you walk into. We expect that our life will unfold as a straight line __________
Finish school, do work we love, get married, and have a wonderful life.
It never quite happens like that as you’ve come to find out yourself.
There are many detours in your life that will take you from here to there.
But if you’re not careful you’ll miss the signs along the way.
What do you want to do with your life?
Growing up, I was almost always certain about what I wanted to do with my life.
My passions were clear to me and my interests were broad as daylight.
As a young child, I allowed myself to explore my curiosities unhinged. I didn’t question a lot of things. If I like it, I threw myself into it and did it.
Throughout school, I waltzed my way through cheering crowds and smiling faces.
If I wasn’t presenting in the debating society, I was leading a dance group or acting in a play as a devoted drama club member.
I jumped in and out of connected interests in acting, dancing, modeling, music, and speaking.
Basically, if it involved putting on a show for people, I was right there.
Always the center of attention, it wasn’t hard to tell that I was going to have a career that put me on stage.
To my younger self, it was clear I was going to be a “superstar”.
And I wanted that.
I dreamed of being on TV, of having people screaming my name, and traveling all around the world living my dreams.
That’s why by age 21 when I was rounding up at University, I didn’t have to think twice about what I wanted to do with my life.
I believed in my heart that I wanted to chase a career in music. I had gone through an unintentional apprenticeship by entertaining my peers.
I turned out to be a local school superstar in every school I attended. What were the odds that the big wild world was not waiting for me in excited anticipation?
All I needed to do was be done with school and throw myself into my dreams.
When I tell you, I was sure, I was.
I was so convinced that as soon as I rounded up my final papers as a Computer Science student, I packed up and zoomed out.
I never went back to my University to get my Certificate.
Why?
What would a superstar like me need a University degree for?
I had no intentions of working a 9-to-5 or having a job like everyone else. Don’t you see? I’m a star.
And so the grind began.
Dreams do come true, but the script never plays out as planned.
From age 21 till 28, I poured myself into building a career as a music artist in Nigeria.
Music was an all-encompassing expression of my exuberant character. It allowed me to do all I wanted in one and it was all I knew. So it was the best choice.
It turned out I had been right about the world waiting for me.
As I began to chase my dreams, hopping from one studio to the next and lending my voice to a microphone, it all began to form.
One minute I’m in my father’s house writing amateur lyrics in notepads. The next minute my music is blasting out of speakers on the radio.
People were beginning to know my name. I was shaking hands with the who is whos, appearing in magazines, and performing at shows.
Baby, I’m a star. I did it! Look, I’m living my dreams! Everything is perfect!
Yes.
Everything appeared perfect.
Until one day, frail and pale in the face, I looked in the mirror and a mere shadow of my former self stared back at me.
Who was that?
How did I go from an animated young woman to a solemn-paced caricature?
One day, nine years after the first time I ever stepped foot in a studio, I woke up and said -”Fuck this music shit!!”
I no longer wanted it. I no longer wanted to have anything to do with music.
My passion had fizzled like a dying candle and I had lost my spark. There was no more flame left in me. I had no passion for what I had a passion for.
Something that was once bubbling with life inside me had died.
In what seemed like a blink, I had gone from being sure about my purpose in life to completely losing all sense of who I was.
Depersonalization. A tiny form of madness
A crucial part of my journey was the depersonalization phase. There seemed to be a push and pull, tug-of-war happening inside my chest.
I could no longer identify with who I was, or who people said I was.
“Eva the Rapper”, “Eva the superstar”
Who is that?
I felt like I was on the outside looking in.
I didn’t want anything to do with her. She was like a mask, hiding something more definite, something more real.
I was curious about what that something was.
The best solution I could come up with was to distance myself from ‘her’, whoever she was. I didn’t know her. She wasn’t me. She was a mask, a cover, some type of front.
Okay, so who the fuck am I if I’m not her?
A girl has no name. A girl is nothing. A girl is no one.
Deciding to distance myself completely from who I had been for years brought with it a new set of problems. Okay so if I’m not that, then what am I?
I realized all these damn labels were a problem on their own. It was the labels, these stories we tell ourselves about who we are, and what we decide to etch on our foreheads as our identities that really define how we see ourselves.
By deciding to free myself of all the labels I had identified with in the past, I gave myself the chance to be empty.
But if something is empty, it must feel itself again. Nature harbors a vacuum. Where there is a vacuum, there is a potential for creation.
Now we must recreate ourselves.
Curiosity Creates your Fate
By becoming no-thing, and mentally dropping my identity, I now had a new zest for life.
I could do anything I wanted.
I felt like I had wings and could fly. There were no expectations of me but those I was going to put upon myself in the present moment.
By being a nobody, I felt more confident about doing whatever the fuck I wanted.
I was a child again. Everything was brand new.
I gave myself permission to do whatever interested me.
If I wanted to write, I wrote.
If I wanted to act, I made a short film.
And I sculpted art, learned video editing, started another YouTube channel to teach evarything I was learning, I designed digital courses to help people make money online, became a coach for content creators, and went on to build software for course creators, learned how to build websites, and did everything that popped into my head at random.
And I did it all by myself, without hiring help, asking for people’s opinions or waiting to be ready.
I welcomed life.
I welcomed newness.
I welcomed play.
I felt free. This freedom was unlike any other.
There was no restriction to what I could be or do. I was not Eva the Rapper, I was a Human Being. First
Just Be. You don’t have to be doing doing doing all the time
Our world forces us to be in a constant chase for something outside of ourselves.
We are hustling, always on the go, with daily to-do lists longer than book chapters.
We never seem to slow down, always in a hurry, from one thing to the next.
Giving myself permission to have no obligations gave me an inner sense of peace.
I learned to stop. To be still.
I accepted that I didn’t have to be doing-doing all the time.
I am a human being, not a human doing.
And in this state of beingness is where the magic of life and creation happen.
By having no expectations and no pressure to fit into a certain identity, I was free to be still.
Leaning into Loneliness. It’s time to go away alone
A big part of finding yourself is being with yourself, by yourself.
You cannot find yourself when you are drowning in the opinions and noise of others. It’s more difficult to hear the still small voice within when everyone is trying to make their voices heard.
I have always been a loner.
I spent a great part of the past 6 years alone. The only people I saw were my family, who are also my best companions.
Friends? I had three real friends who I saw once every other 3 or so months.
But for the most part, I was alone.
It was in the deafening loudness of my silent time alone that I was able to hear myself.
I journaled my thoughts. A lot! And through journaling, I was able to decipher which thoughts were mine and which weren’t.
I began to pay attention to which thoughts were detrimental and which ones were building me into who I wanted to be.
Solitude is the resting place of the restless mind.
Jollof - The combination of Everything that makes you, you.
At first, we say we are multitalented and we do many things. This is usually a good thing in the beginning.
We pride ourselves on knowing too much.
We are doing more things than most people and the word ‘Multitalented’ is like a stamp of approval of our own genius.
That is until we begin to feel the burden of the confusion that comes with wanting to be and do everything. Now genius doesn’t know what to do with itself.
In my state of chasing my curiosity, having no obligations, and feeling free, I tried my hands at many things.
I picked new hobbies and dropped them like a hot plate as soon as I got bored.
All the while, I was acquiring skills. I was teaching my brain new combinations and connections. I was developing myself as a human being.
I didn’t know this at first, but all the many things I tried my hands on were the very ingredients I needed to mold who I am today.
If I didn’t explore makeup artistry, education services, digital marketing, technology, social media, writing, and many other things, I wouldn’t be who I am now.
Jollof, las las, that’s what you’ll become my friend.
The perfect combination of all the many little things that make up the unique human that you were born to be. Jollof.
Try many things to find your thing
When people tell me they don’t know what they want to do with their lives, I say, “No, you haven’t tried a lot of things yet.”
Again, what you want to do with your life is completely up to you. You are not going to find it out in one day either.
I also no longer believe our lives will unfold in a linear fashion.
There is a whole zig-zaggedness about this as I’ve come to learn.
The moment you say “I don’t know what to do with my life,” you open up a loop to do anything. There, you have permission. Now you can go do whatever the fuck you want.
Chase your curiosity. Pick things up and drop them off fast.
Romanticizing our ideas is what gets us in trouble. We idolize what we do and try to identify with our creations, instead of experiencing the thing.
Experience many things,
Only stick to those that make you feel like your life is worth living.
Other notes:
When you think you are stuck, you are standing still, rooting yourself even deeper.
When you feel lost, you are forgetting the old you and giving yourself a chance to recreate yourself.
When you feel depressed, you are only shedding old skin and uncovering who you are
If you want to know what to do with your life, go do many things, then you’ll know.
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This is really encouraging. Thank you for this piece of words🙏🏾.
This is such a refreshing read Eva💚🥹