Some people teach you without ever knowing.
She welcomes me in. The house is a lot bigger than it looks from the street. Opening to a vast space and extending down a sloped block, it is bright, airy and elegant. The feeling of being an imposter immediately rears up – this house is surely far too nice for me to be in. But I ignore it, continuing with the tour and eventually the work.
It is early days in my business so I’ve taken up some house cleaning jobs to bring in extra money. Whatever it takes. Time passes quickly and the woman makes me feel at ease. An entrepreneur with her own company, she has wealth, abundance and confidence miles above my own. Yet she is kind. She doesn’t make me feel less for needing to be there as her cleaner. In fact, she encourages my choice. ‘Just begin with your writing,’ she says. ‘And believe it has already happened.’
She never knew she was my teacher.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve looked up to people who’ve done things differently. Who’ve gone against the grain, defied expectations, been bold enough to choose their own way, then had confidence and self-belief enough to back themselves, even when things got tough. I know what that kind of belief feels like, because I had it once.
When I was young, I was sure I was going to be a ballerina. Coming from a small country town, the odds were unlikely. Until it happened.
It wasn’t just wishful thinking. It was years of commitment. And it was self-belief. When an unforeseen event meant I had no teacher for a couple of years, I did my daily classes alone, in our family loungeroom using the bookcase of encyclopaedias as my ballet barre. I didn’t give up just because things weren’t going to plan. I could see so clearly what was at the other end if only I had the discipline to keep going.
I forgot that lesson for a long time in my later years. After the dancing career was over and I returned to ‘normal’ life, I tried conformity over calling. And it never worked. I commenced and then I stopped things, I tried and moved on from numerous jobs, I hovered through life, restlessly moving from one place to the next, never stopping long enough to settle. Apart from a few brief periods, I was deeply unhappy.
I’d stopped listening to the inner voice that had always driven me forward. I’d tried instead to fit in, to match. To do the things that others were doing, to not make any waves and to live in ways that were expected rather than felt. As a result, I lost the belief in myself. I became resigned to life being ordinary over extraordinary, and I began drinking to numb the pain of that. No matter what I tried, a little voice inside of me was always calling out that surely, there was something more.
It wasn’t until all the other avenues failed that I came back to that voice within – forced to listen finally, because there was nothing else to go back to. But the funny thing is, when I started listening again, things like the serendipitous meeting while I was cleaning began to happen. And those moments led me to begin believing in myself again too.
What I have relearnt since is that stepping into a bigger life is a practice. It takes building daily habits. It takes catching myself in moments of doubt and redirecting my thoughts. It takes gratitude, even when things don’t appear to be working. It takes refusal to be steered off course by others’ disbelief in what’s possible. And it takes a deep desire to live with purpose, and to believe that all the things that led me here have been leading me to exactly where I need to be.
The lady I cleaned for that day had told me that if I felt drawn to something deeply, called to it – or it gave me a sense of meaning by doing it – to never dismiss it because I simply couldn’t see how it would work out. ‘Just begin,’ she’d said. Act and the rest will follow.
How right she was. I didn’t have to be able to see how it would work out. I just had to be willing to believe that it would. What about in your own life? Are you willing to believe in something that no one else can see?
I write from lived experience, not as a clinician or expert. What I share is what I’ve noticed and what has helped me, not advice for everyone. [Why I write this way]
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