My Story - part 1

Hi. I'm Amanda.  I have never formally introduced myself, and because I still don't have my elevator pitch down in short enough form to put on my home page, I thought I would turn my introduction into a blog post. So here it goes....

Although I have loved playing with words and creating imaginary worlds since childhood, I spent over a decade of my adult life in technical consulting - analyzing data and organizing information into spreadsheets, reports, website content and marketing materials. And while I loved the problem and puzzle-solving aspect of this work, I never felt fully fulfilled, and for a while I thought that was just because of something wrong inside of me.

In 2012, when I began exploring a career in what really got me excited (story-telling, comedy, collaborative adventures in children's education), I adopted the belief that the issues I struggled with in my technical career would simply fall away now; that by following a dream I considered more aligned with my spirt, things would get brighter. 

I was very very wrong. In fact, the opposite happened when I left my day job in 2012 and started to work on my creative writing.

​First, I found my issues magnified: the self-worth I struggled with in engineering consulting, despite having an engineering degree, grew five fold in the creative field, where I had no official degree to legitimize my work. (Yes, what I needed was to find a sense of self worth that wasn't dependent on the external world, but I wasn't there yet) 

Second, and what really blindsided me, was when faced with all the time in the world to create whatever I wanted, all I felt was despair and sadness, even when I was well-funded with my savings.  I was finally pursuing this beautiful dream I had since 2002 to create books and television shows out of the lofty goal to help others from having to suffer like me. Yet, I didn't even know how to dream about my own life, day to day, week to week, year to year, on the way to that big goal. I was completely numb to what I even wanted in life, to the ability to even dream for myself. 

As I had originally suspected, my emotional struggles, the gnawing emptiness inside me I had felt since I was a teen were not the result of trying to fit into a less than ideal technical career. It was something much deeper. In my 20s I had been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, and had very intense emotional outbursts, but I thought I had outgrown it. Really I had just learned to fit in with society, to mask a debilitating twisted sense of self worth. And the more I stuffed that down, the more depressed I got until I finally came to realize that what was going on inside of me energetically was a form of trauma that results from repeated experiences in early life growing up with an alcoholic parent, something I had never addressed head on. 

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My emotional struggles, the gnawing emptiness inside me I had felt since I was a teen were not the result of trying to fit into a less than idea technical career. It was something much deeper that was causing both the emptiness and the self betrayal involved in pursuing something that is not aligned. 

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So when the structure of the day job was removed in 2012, all that unaddressed trauma and pain came at me full force. And although I had a desire to help others by sharing my inspirational stories with the world, the desire was still rooted in the need to justify my existence, to fill the emptiness I had felt my whole life since my teens.

The emptiness wasn't going to be filled by simply diving into my creative career. It wasn't going to be filled by saving others so I could validate my existence. The trauma was built into my cells, and not even reading self-help books, journalling or meditating was going to reprogram the traumas. Well, not on their own. And not on my own. Because some kinds of traumas are too great to hold space with alone.

What I needed was to become vigilantly aware of every belief I held inside me about my self worth, to write them out daily and then also write the opposite. AND, even more importantly, to do this work in the safety of a warm community guided by someone who had experienced similar things, reached the other side and now shares it with others with the upmost integrity. 

What I found from the process of looking at my beliefs around self-worth, was that I held the ridiculous notion that I could not have what I want, especially the things I wanted most. It suddenly all made sense. No wonder when I went after my most passionate dreams, I felt even more pain. Because deep down I believed the bigger the desire, the less likely I could have it.

With this awareness, the next step was to retrain my mind.  One simple way was to write down the opposite of the negative belief, and create mantras around it. Another, which I am working on now, is to take steps every day outside my comfort zone - practice achieving the things I want, in small ways first, before getting to the bigger things. All in the context of being a part of a supportive loving community who share these values and are on a similar path.

Now, as I continue to work on my creative projects, my intention is to put myself out there more, to show up and be visible - going live on Instagram and Facebook; practice selling simple things to learn to trust that I can be an entrepreneur; and take the focus off of me and my self-worth, and more on how I can be of service to others on similar paths. This has led me to some side projects in writing workshops and strategy consulting to help me build the courage to more confidently share my artistic projects with the world. ​I hope that sharing my journey will help others on their path, and that some day I can touch the world with my creativity.