What if you could make a living, WITHOUT the anxiety & depression that makes life miserable? Let’s build the Economic Ecosystem of your dreams.
In my STUDY, SAVOR, & SUPPORT Each Other CHAT☕️🍵, we’re doing a deep-dive into our Book Club selection! This week is Chapter 10 of BEYOND ANXIETY: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose by Martha Beck.
In Chapter 10: Constellating an Ecosystem, MB teaches us how people who look like failures on the outside may very well be astronomically successful, not only wealthy in money, but more importantly wealthy in creative practice and spirit.
In one example, she tells us the story of a drug addict who walks miles collecting trash, who grew up the youngest of six, in a household that banished him for being gay, who suffered from behavioral ticks akin to OCD or Tourette’s Syndrome.
How might this now-70-year-old trash-collecting wanderer be, in actuality, a New York Times Bestselling Author, with multiple homes, and art collections that include works by Picasso?
He’s none other than David Sedaris, an American humorist who’s won awards and reads his essays and short stories to sold out crowds.
In a world inundated with competing voices on social media and all sorts of competing content from TV, movies, and the internet, Sedaris managed to carve out a unique platform of 1: him.
Not because he followed the Rulebook mandated by society. But precisely because he broke the rules.
No climbing the ladder of success. No meeting and pleasing the right gatekeepers.
He did what he liked. He chose what he wanted to do, what he liked to do, and did it — regardless of what anyone told him — and he documented it in essays until his creative writing became a force unto itself.
Then, the Magic Ingredient: He refused to stop. He refused to not-be himself.
And he keeps being himself, even now, cleaning and picking up trash off the road simply because he enjoys it. MB dubs this…
“A New Economic Ecosystem”
This blows my mind. Because nothing in my upbringing believes that this is possible.
Not following the Rulebook?
Not only that, but chucking it out the window of a speeding car, so Sedaris can spike it with a TrashStik and plunge the damned Rulebook into the bin?
What magic is this?!
It’s Creative Alchemy!
According to MB, she’s witnessed this Creative Alchemy hundreds of times. As she puts it:
We could see Sidaris’s career as a fluke, a one-in-a-million story of someone who happened to succeed, despite indulging in his eccentricity, but after seeing firsthand how hundreds of clients and friends have found success on unlikely career paths, I don’t see it that way.
I believe that Sedaris is rich and famous because he indulges his eccentricity. He’s become the center of a supportive, abundant network of people, ideas, events, and financial wealth that naturally forms around people who live creatively.
I call the process of connecting with such a network ‘constellating an economic ecosystem,’ and I believe we can all do it.
That bears repeating: We can ALL do it!
We just have to be brave enough to close the Rulebook and open our eyes, to see & study the path others have paved.
These Creative Alchemists are already shining the light for us, so we can see it’s possible. And the solution’s simpler than our Anxiety-Spiraling-Left-Hemispheres make it out to be:
The SOLUTION is to Create, FREE of Anxiety
To make any progress, we must break free of our Anxiety Spirals. It’s the only way we can have the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual energy to play in the Creativity Spirals that are required to constellate our own Economic Ecosystem.
It’s hard work. But if we dedicate ourselves to our Highest Self, we CAN be like all the other Creative Alchemists who’ve been able to generate wealth, and — more importantly — satisfy our soul.
The only question now is: Do you want to be pulled or pushed to success?
(1) Let Yourself be PULLED to Success
The triple-promise of Freedom, Wealth, and Soul-Satisfying Creative Work can PULL you to constellate the Economic Ecosystem that’s meant for you.
(2) Let Yourself be PUSHED to Success
If these pulls aren’t particularly strong for you, there’s a pushing force too.
As MB warns, it’s absolutely necessary in our current world, where the traditional job market is uprooted by changes like AI, to constellate our own Economic Ecosystem, because the structure that generated the rule book is under threat of collapsing entirely.
BEWARE The Bait That’s Meant to Cage You: Whether we PULL or PUSH ourselves to success, we must always beware the draw of sticking to the Rulebook.
MB understands it more than most. She remembers the appeal of trying to get tenure as a professor in academia. But the thought of it made her “flesh crawl.” So, she walked away from it and abandoned the Rulebook, despite the ominous admonition from another tenured professor, who’d reacted with the rude remark, “Well then, I guess you’ll never be anything but a lovely faculty wife” (because her then-husband/now-ex was on tenure track).
Oh my. How that blustering colleague was wrong.
As we learned in Ch. 9: Breaking Your Role Rules, Minding Your Mission, MB became a Life Coach despite the fact it was like a bad word in the academic world. And, instead of meeting her doom, it led her down an enviable path, to constellate her own Economic Ecosystem where she gets to (NOT “has to”) spend every day working with Creative friends, coaching Creatives like us, and actually enjoying her work — full of writing, artwork, and in-person safari adventures surrounded by the nature and wildlife that she’s loved since she was a child, at the Londolozi Nature Reserve in South Africa.
(Oh, and that Tenured Professor? Turns out he was fired for reasons unknown. Oops. Guess he didn’t know the secret to a secure career, after all. 😝) Bottom line is…
We Can Actually ENJOY — not only a fruitful career, but RELISH the lives we choose to live — when we stop mindlessly following the play-by-play in the Roles Rulebook that Society’s written for us.
It won’t be easy. Even MB, with her teaching experience and Harvard degrees, wasn’t sure she was making the right choice to walk away. At the time, a large part of her thought that that Tenured Professor was right.
But her body, mind, and spirit simply forced her to abandon that path.
Her fibromyalgia and other health-related issues sapped her of all her energy and she had young kids to take care of.
Hers was not only a battle of having the will to walk away from a sensible job, it was for her, like it is for us…
The Battle for Us to Keep Living!
I feel this in my bones.
It’s not just some rah-rah remark that I’m making.
It’s the inner war that’s been raging inside of me for most of my life.
It’s the exact reason why I chose VICTUS for my Pen Name, and made Vita est pro victus My Mission!
Because Victus is Latin for “Living” or “Way of Life.”
And Vita est pro victus means “Life is for Living” — TRULY LIVING!
TRULY LIVING — not as a shell of who we could be, but as the true embodiment of our most honest Authentic Self!
For more, read this:
How to be Happy when Who You Are is NOT Who You are MEANT to be.
I’m inspired to be a Creative Alchemist, aren’t you?
MB’s courage and willingness to walk away from the tenure track academic path she was on, and refusing to succumb to pressure from her (terribly boorish 🤣) colleague was hilarious and so, so relatable. Especially her description of how her health played a key role in her decision.
Are YOU as ready as I am, to BREAK FREE and
• Ignore society’s playbook?
• Refuse to adhere to the limiting “role rules” that we’ve been indoctrinated to follow?
• Champion your own unique Creative Mission?
• Find endlessly inspiring ways to make your creativity your career?
• Make money for your own financial stability and — dare I say it — FREEDOM to be the boss of your own destiny?
Now, take a Mindful Minute to reflect on your life:
⭐️ For our journaling this week, let’s reflect on the stories mentioned above and identify which parts resonated with you.
⭐️ Does any part of you want to transform your own life, as well?
⭐️ How could you take one step — just one — to champion your Creative Self this week?
👭 Do you want to enlist the help of a Fellow Creative, to help you BREAK FREE?
Our CHAT can be a safe place to tell safe people what you’d like to accomplish, so we can all support & cheer you on.
👭 If you’re comfortable doing so, feel free to tell us what Creative Practice you would like to try whenever one of your Anxiety Spirals starts to spin.
Let’s TRUST in our ability to constellate our own Economic Ecosystem, to be the Creatives we are meant to be.
Together, we can support each other on our healing journeys.
Together, we can BREAK FREE.
The Creative Alchemist in me honors & respects the Creative Alchemist in each of you.
Marisa
⭐️ Remember, we don’t have to figure everything out, all alone. ⭐️
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