'I think midlife is when the universe gently places her hands upon your shoulders, pulls you close, and whispers in your ear:
I’m not screwing around. It’s time. All of this pretending and performing – these coping mechanisms that you’ve developed to protect yourself from feeling inadequate and getting hurt – has to go.
Your armor is preventing you from growing into your gifts. I understand that you needed these protections when you were small. I understand that you believed your armor could help you secure all of the things you needed to feel worthy of love and belonging, but you’re still searching and you’re more lost than ever.
Time is growing short. There are unexplored adventures ahead of you. You can’t live the rest of your life worried about what other people think. You were born worthy of love and belonging. Courage and daring are coursing through you. You were made to live and love with your whole heart. It’s time to show up and be seen.’'
~ Brené Brown
I posted this quote on Facebook yesterday and it resonated deeply with quite a few of you. Many of you reached out privately to make sure that I was OK. Thank you for doing so. I am OK. For real.
I’m not having a midlife crisis - at least, I don’t think I am. But I am feeling - in a big, big way - the sentiment that Brené is talking about (can I call her Brené?; sure; hi Brené!).
So I’m starting a blog. This very blog! Welcome to it. This is Day One Post One. This is the “jump” I’ve been holding off on making for years, pretty much purely because of fear. Launching this blog is what Brené is telling me to do, between the lines of her quote. This is me showing up and being seen.
I haven't always had a problem showing up and being seen. Many of you know me from way back, from elementary and high school and college (college is now officially “way back,” FYI) and my guess is that those of you who knew me then thought of me as kind of a loud dude who wasn’t afraid to say whatever was on his mind, for better and certainly for worse.
Others of you know me from my professional life, as a screenwriter and filmmaker and Maker of Sports Television, and I would imagine that you guys felt much the same way - that I wasn’t the type of person to be inhibited by fear. I was pretty much a damn-the-torpedos, move-fast-and-break-stuff kind of guy in my 20’s and 30’s.
But in my late 30’s and 40’s all that moving fast and breaking stuff caught up with me, and I took a couple of bad falls. I’m still recovering from them. And one of the side effects of those falls is that I haven’t really written anything from the heart in about seven years. This, after 17 years of waking up at dawn and writing from the heart pretty much every single day, from the day I left college until I was 38 years old.
This blog is me trying to get back to being that person - or, better yet, an even better version of that person. I want to move forward again as a writer, taking into account my falls and recoveries, all of it, wrapping them into a new daily habit, and creating new original work again.
I know I have work left to do, and I’d like to think my best work is ahead of me. So this blog, starting with this post, is me pushing myself out of the nest and putting myself out there again in front of you.
I'll post more in a bit about the kind of stuff I'm going to be writing about - including a project that a few have you have been patiently waiting for for a long, long time - but I think today is just about launching and saying hello.
Thanks for being there at the beginning.
-Josh
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