What is your anxiety trying to tell you?

I managed to ask myself the question in the midst of a panic attack. My jaw was clinched, teeth grinding together rhythmically and hands busy rolling a ball of invisible dough—something I notice I do when I’m supremely anxious. It was my job. I was, I am overwhelmed at work in a way that I cannot communicate because there is no one there to hear me. I am sure many people feel this same sensation right now. Like they want to ask for help but you don’t even know what to ask for or who has the extra bandwidth to lend assistance.

Much of my frustration has to do with the job itself and just the timing of things but another piece of it is my own struggle to stay focused. My heart is not in my job and it is hard to stay committed when my heart is not in it. I needed a spark, and typically working directly with students provided it for me but when I sat back to reflect I realized that this was not my job at all, this was my pattern. Around this time in any position, I start to grow antsy and disengaged in a way that perhaps only I would notice. My productivity has not changed, it is just the feeling I have when producing, if that makes sense.

When I sat with myself, even more still, I further recognized that my heart just longed to be free of the reigns of working within a system, the system. In my first year of grad school, my Mentor Zachary gave me perhaps the most remarkable feedback on an assignment that I had ever received from any teacher at any stage of my education. I still remember where i was when I read it, it was that impactful. He said to me:

While from a technical and academic perspective there can be little argument with your work, it seems to me that there is another level available to you that you continue to silence. My dilemma is that if I acknowledge this work as sufficient for your true capacity then I am also rewarding your propensity to hide out…

Are you freaking out yet? I am in tears typing the words back out. Reading them again as if he said them to me just yesterday. Finding truth in them, still. He continued,

My deeper concern is that you may continue to fall prey to a persona—perhaps even a false self—that has no doubt served you well thus far but does not honor the depth of capacity that you have.”

So often I operate within my persona, my safe self. Academia, for me, is a place of safety. Zachary knew it and I have known it for some time now. It is part of the reason that I do not pursue full time faculty; it would be too delicious a distraction from my actual intention in this life. So what was my anxiety trying to tell me? That I DO NOT BELONG HERE.

I do not belong in these spaces, though I fit, and though I have worked tremendously hard to hold certain authority within these spaces, they were never designed with me in mind and they simply do not fit me. Or I, them. I belong on the margins.

Do you want to know a secret that I have known but have been too afraid to say?

I want to be something with no name and many names.

Ideally, my life would be the main source of creative inspiration and even my vacations would be taken with specific intention, awareness and accommodation to my work. I would research both myself and others. I would create curriculums to help people heal based on how I learned to do it myself, and I would create those curriculums alongside cohorts of people who were willing to learn in action. I want to embrace dynamism in instruction and disillusion people of the idea that the teacher has the wisdom rather the teacher is simply a facilitator of a process that is owned by the collective.

I want to have coaching cohorts and also do workshops in healing spaces that I curate with artists advocates and activists to promote experiential learning, indigenous and somatic ways of knowing. I want my life to be something of a “reality show” where I am producing content that is accessible to people straight from me in a way that is digestible and relatable. I want to always center myself as my rough draft for my ideas and offer myself and my experiences to the collective.

I want to write books. I want to write a film (or two) and create a documentary as well. I want to have work on behalf of those people who look to empower themselves through community. I want to carve out my own world where there is harmony rather than the cacophonous demands for power I am surrounded by in my present reality. I want to do things I can’t see yet because part of my work is in embracing the unknown and teaching others how to develop more a capacity for the same. My gift is to teach by doing, my joy is that it is also how I learn.

I wanted to say it out loud finally so that anyone who might happen to read this could hold the dream closer to the light. Believe it for me. See me as that being who was able to make her life her art, her meditation and her prayer. Hold the dream that not only am I all that I believe I am being called to be, but that your belief in me is doing your part to co-create a new reality for all of us. One that allows many more people to re-write the narrative. Many more people who are able to scream, articulately “that is NOT my name” and then be ready to tell anyone who asks exactly who you are.