How Living Beyond Fear Opened My Life

Looking back on the last year of my life, I don’t know how I could’ve planned it. Wonderful friends and mentors have waltzed into my life under the most unassuming circumstances. I was dead set on moving to Paris despite the fact that it's insanely expensive and through some miracle I did. One year I had no clue what I would be doing a year from then and for many months I lived in fear of not being able to live the life I wanted to live.

My entire life changed the moment I changed my mindset.

Instead of looking at the future and feeling scared, I started looking at my future and feeling wonder. My life is a mystery that could become anything, and I started seeing that as a fact of extreme excitement rather than a point of crippling fear.

I began to imagine the way my life could turn out wonderfully, and almost instantly, it did.

I imagined myself moving to Paris. I imagined myself finding employment that would allow me to do so. I imagined myself living in LA in the interim. I imagined myself being my own boss. I imagined myself finding a mentor. All of these wishes came true. I actually ended up finding 2 mentors. Lucky me.

This is not to say that I made wishes and *poof* they came true. I worked. A lot. In the real world and in my inner world. But my attitude towards my life drastically changed the outcome of my work.

And here I sit in Paris actually living a dream. I’d like to say I don’t know how I got here, but I do. I moved past my fear and manifested this life for myself. I gave myself a goal and believed it would happen. In trusting it would work out, I opened seemingly inconsequential doors in my every day life that I would’ve definitely passed had I been in the mindset of inevitable failure.

I started to look at life as a series of opening little gifts over a long period of time. And as the great Mary Oliver once pointed out, even the gifts of darkness, sadness, and failure are gifts all the same. If I had kept on living in the mindset of fear, I would still be sitting in a room with a pile of unopened gifts, terrified of opening boxes for fear of opening a bad one. What a shame. Now every day is my birthday. I’m opening gifts left and right. Some of those gifts have included losing a job and ending a friendship. They’re not all roses. But I also opened new friendships. And a life in Paris. And a new creative wind. From now on I will open and receive all the boxes and whatever they hand me. Because I’ll never open the lavish wishes of all my dreams if I don’t continue tearing off each wrapping paper with a fearlessness about what might be inside.

FACEBOOK