How I Rediscovered My Sensitivity-Part Two

I spent most of my 20's striving towards becoming "something" of significance. My parents, meaning well, reiterated that money and status mattered. The idea of having her oldest daughter venture off to the West Coast to pursue a career in the entertainment industry as a writer was as ludicrious to my mother as the idea that the sky might be green instead of blue. Not being of the artistic sort, I couldn't really expect her to understand, but inside I felt extremely dissapointed and frustrated. She wanted me to stay home and go to college in the same "boring" town she had chosen to move to and that I yearned to fly away from. She wanted me to be practical.

So, I obliged, at least outwardly. Inwardly it was a very different story. My spirit never obliged. In fact, it began to rebel and rebel quite well. The "studious one" began to ditch her classes, experiment with danger, apply and get accepted to other colleges, and then finally left school altogether. I went back of course, but by the end of that year long "break," I had decided to lean my ladder against the wrong wall. I had decided to pursue practicality, a career in business, of all places. A business career meant you could make money, possibly lots of it and become "important," whatever that entailed. A career and field of study involving superfluous things that this world values that have no inherent depth or substance. A world I should've avoided, but my curiosity had other plans.

Curiosity only gets you so far. History began to repeat itself because the heart never loses sight of its true desire. This time my break landed me in Orlando, where I finally got the chance to breathe. I didn't have the obligations and the expectations of being someone others wanted me to be. I got the chance to experience life for the first time. New faces, new friends, new sights, new sounds. Yes, there was work involved too, but it didn't seem like work, despite Disney's high expectations. Maybe it was being able to create fun and happiness for others. Maybe it was being in a world of fantasy and play, who knows. All I knew at the time was that this was where I wanted to be. It was magical and I didn't want that feeling to end. I still made decisions one hundred percent with my heart; logical thinking was nowhere to be found. Well, perhaps there was a little logic. I did return home to finish that first business degree before packing my boxes and moving to the other coast to pursue "something" bigger than what I had known.

The Universe had other plans for me though. Florida became a lesson in learning the value of developing a practical side. I'm extremely grateful for the lesson and the fact that I had who would become my best friend to lean on during those times. I'm grateful that I'm still able to, just in a different way. My heart still wanted the same things, but I took the lesson as a sign that perhaps I was in the wrong place and needed to go home for awhile to rethink things. It was one of the hardest decisions I ever made. How do you leave a new life you created, that you wanted, but whose pieces weren't somehow fitting together? How do you leave behind a piece of you? Most of all, how do you leave someone that you love more than you thought it was ever possible to love, who clearly is unable to stand the thought of you leaving?

Copyright 2009 by H.E.A.

We will return to Part Three of "How I Rediscovered My Sensitivity" in just a moment......