Don’t Wait For Others To Open The Right Doors For You!

Between the ages of 11 and 35, I lost touch with my own natural inclination to open new doors. I started out in life nice and bold but that didn’t work well in institutional settings, like school and work, which are based from my own experiences on behavioral control. Instead I was encouraged to sit around waiting for others to open doors for me, something I found super frustrating and emotionally painful because I wasn’t interested in what was behind those generic doors.

Somewhere along the middled-age line, I noticed once again there were other doors next to the default door and I stepped into my courage and opened them with the key I found in my pocket that I had forgotten was there all along. At first it was just a crack open, then I went full bold and flung it back as wide as I could.

Nirvana.

I’m convinced we socialize the young to be blind to their own power to keep them in consumer line. You’ll learn to love spending your days in the mall, buying stuff in triplicate that you will sell at a yard sale for 1/25th the price later in life. One of my first essays in the Boston Globe was about this realization. It was called “A Shopper Discovers Life Outside The Mall.”

Taking charge of my own door openings made a massive difference in my life trajectory. It ejected me out of the default world into the active world. I opened the door to my own company, something I wouldn’t have considered earlier, even though my dad and my grandfather had their own companies. I had been groomed to work for others and despite feeling like I was a caged animal, I never thought of doing anything other than finding another job, thinking it was the job or the boss or the commute that was the problem. I opened doors to opening my own greeting card line, something I wanted to do but never did because I wasn’t sure exactly how to do it and thought I had to be an expert at whatever that was to start.

Well, the way to do it is to just do it and figure it out as one goes along! It is amazing how many obstacles we throw into our own paths in order to keep ourselves from doing what we really want to do.

That action alone will help quell any fears. Best wishes with those adverturecises!

Feel Alive,

Giulietta