Find Your Wildheart

I remember the exact moment. The interviewer leaning forward and asking what I actually wanted to do with my life, and for a second the room went quiet. I had an answer. Or maybe the envisioned one I thought of. It was sitting right there, too big, too specific and too likely to disappoint someone I hadn’t even thought of yet. So, I swallowed it. I gave them something safe instead, something with a job title and a salary range, and they nodded like I’d said the right thing. I had. I got the job. Then ‘hated’ it for the entire period. The kind hate that lets you sigh when the alarm goes off for duty.

Nobody forced that silence on me. Shame did. Not the loud kind. The quiet, well-mannered kind that shows up looking like maturity. The fear of becoming the one who “tried something different” and failed. That fear kept me small long before anyone else got the chance to.

Maybe you know this chair too. Maybe you’ve sat in your own version of it, the desk, the church pew, the dinner table where someone asked what you really wanted and you gave them the answer that wouldn’t cost you anything.

I think about the business idea I never pitched, because I could already hear what people would say if it collapsed. Not if it succeeded! Only if it collapsed, as though failure was the one outcome ‘the society’ had ever rehearsed me for. I think about the scholarship I never applied for because I assumed it was built for people with better connections, better English, better everything, and I saved myself the trouble of finding out by staying exactly where I’d been told I belonged.

Every one of those choices wore the costume of humility. Look closely and you’ll see none of them were humility at all. They were shame, dressed carefully enough that I didn’t recognize the theft while it was happening. Ask yourself, right now, what you’ve called “being realistic” that was actually this.

Nobody sits you down and tells you plainly how shame operates where we come from. It doesn’t announce itself as fear. It announces itself as respect for your elders, as not wanting to disappoint anyone, as staying grounded. It hides inside good manners, inside the phrase “not the right time,” inside every reasonable sounding reason you’ve given for staying put. It convinces you that wanting more is a betrayal of the people who sacrificed for you, when the sacrifice was always so you’d have room to want more, not less.

And here’s the part that should unsettle you the way it unsettled me. Tomorrow was never promised. Not to the person who died still saving for a trip “they” kept postponing. Not to the friend who was going to start applying “next year.” Shame survives on the lie that there’s always more time to give it. There isn’t! And some part of you already knows that, which is exactly why this is landing the way it is right now.

So, this is me refusing to keep making payments on a debt I never agreed to. Not because the fear left. It hasn’t. But because I finally saw who was collecting on it, and it was never me, and it was certainly never the people I was so afraid of disappointing.

That thing you’re sitting on right now, the one you’ve filed under “not the right time,” is closer than you think it is. Closer than I let myself believe for years. Now isn’t the reward waiting at the end of enough courage.

Now is the only currency any of us have ever actually held.

What are you still making payments on?