Tears blurred out the cheerful woman on the webinar. My heart pounded alarmingly, and it felt like I had swallowed a hot coal. This was looking like another failure.
I had just spent more than $2k that I didn’t have, on this class that promised a “proven path to meaningful, creative, work from home.” By a person who sincerely seemed to care.
I had spent 3 months grinding to learn the new skills she taught, sleeping only 4-5 hour nights to dedicate as much time to the class as I could, around my already insanely full life of work and parenting. I had been living off of protein bars and caffeine. My hair was falling out.
I had even learned her system, built the tool, started the marketing. But now I was supposed to sell it… by pretending to be someone I’m not… for years.
And here was this sweet, cheerful woman, on the day of our “graduation ceremony”, telling me that she had designed the perfect thing just for us, yet ANOTHER expensive membership, that we probably couldn’t succeed without.
It felt like being forcefed death-cap-mushroom meatloaf by your well-meaning aunt.
But the truth was, this “proven path”, like all the others, was not looking good for me. Once you got past the bells and whistles, it looked just like another cage. Another too-small, too-tame, too-frightened-and-desperate-for-approval kind of life.
And I would rather be a bog witch.
But why do I keep choosing the wrong path? Why do I keep falling for it?
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Loss of the Handmade Life
Clarisa Pinkola Estes, in Women Who Run With the Wolves, brings a fundamental faith that I lack.
She believes that we once knew who we needed to be and what felt right for us. We loved what we loved, and we instinctively knew what was wrong for us.
And we lost that instinctive ability. The ability to celebrate our joys, sense out and avoid the traps, and stay the course of our own most meaningful life.
Our culture, our communities, our well-meaning adults tried to “protect us”. By telling us to be quiet, be easy, need less, feel less, be normal.
And we gradually lost our ability to recognize our own joy or the simple things that feed our souls.
And after long enough with unfed souls, like any animal having survived a famine, we find ourselves starving for the first thing that seems like it will feed us. But it burns us instead. Or worse, traps us into another version of an empty life.
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The Red Shoes
Estes finds her map in the myth of the red dancing shoes.
(Here’s the Hans Christian Anderson version, http://hca.gilead.org.il/red_shoe.html. Note this one has important differences from Estes tale, though.)
In Estes retelling, in a nutshell:
A poor, motherless girl makes her own shabby red shoes and is happy, foraging in the woods at the edge of the village. But then she is adopted by a rich old woman who burns her handmade shoes, but gives her an education and nice black shoes.
Therefore, the girl is left with unrequited longing for something more. Eventually she buys fancy red dancing shoes, wears them to church, and causes a scandal. The old woman forbids it, but gets sick, and eventually dies. And the girl leaves with her dancing shoes for a ball.
But she finds she can’t take them off, can’t stop dancing, and can’t control them. She is cursed to dance forever, dance herself to death. Until after a long, desperate, time she dances her way to the town executioner, and asks him to cut off her feet.
“Okay!” He says, and chops them off. He doesn’t want to leave her there bleeding, so he kindly makes her new wooden feet, and she hobbles away.
“And she never longs for red shoes again.”
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Shoes, Identity, and How We Walk Through Life
If our feet are what helps us walk through life, give us mobility and freedom, then our shoes are what protects our autonomy.
Shoes:
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Cushion us from the stones, splinters, and ice on the road. (They offer physical protection, like money, a car, or a coat, that allows easier movement through life. They also represent emotional assets, like a sunny disposition and positive mindset, that protect us from pain and fear.)
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Are connected to social protection and wealth (Both money and status can offer protection from the bumps in life).
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Signal what kind of walking we do (hiking boots are different than dress shoes, and say something different about how you’re planning to act, what you “do for a living,” and how you spend your days).
Your identity, interestingly, is built on the same set of ideas. People don’t see what your “goal in life” is or where you’re going. They don’t see how you feel or your inner “why.”
But they do see the kind of walking you do (church shoes or dancing shoes?), whether you seem to have protection or not (wealth, status, and mindset), and how you seem to feel about what you’re doing right now (cheerful or gloomy?).
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The Identity and Path That Doesn’t Feed Your Soul
The trouble comes when you end up doing something that doesn’t feed your soul, wearing a group-affiliation that doesn’t feed your soul, with an attitude that doesn’t feed your soul.
This whole story – from the foraging wild child, to the staunch old lady, to the church, to the longing for the dancing shoes – is ALL about how you feed your soul.
First, the girl is poor, with no mother and no one to feed her. Estes says she is making her way foraging, crafting her own shoes, and happy. Although she has little, and things are hard, she has herself, her own rhythm, and her own way, and she has found peace and joy in it. She is feeding her soul.
But the old woman comes and takes the food she truely needs – wildness, creativity, her mother’s love – and replaces it with empty but acceptable things that “should” be good for her. Her body is fed and safe, in other words, but her soul is left starved.
The church here is supposed to play the role of what feeds the girls’ soul. But she isn’t satisfied, she longs for more; she longs for what she lost – her vibrancy, vitality, passion, and creative joy – her red shoes.
What Estes knows is that she longs for all this because the church is NOT feeding her soul – she is still starving. The group’s “approval” is actually a kind of poison that keeps pushing her down the wrong path instead.
So the girl becomes stuck in a way of life that seems like it will feed her soul, will fill the longing for something more vital and meaningful. But instead, she was mistaken, she made the wrong choice, because she was confused at this point about what food was satisfying. She has been hungry for too long.
And this is where we are as a culture. We’ve been locked into lives that don’t feed our souls, hoping to feed our bodies and stay safe and get approval instead. Hoping to subsist on the scraps.
But instead, we are starving for something creative, passionate, honest, and alive, and the starvation itself is ruining our ability to discern what mode of living, what way of walking through the world, is actually good for us.
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Cutting Off the Wrong Life
So what do we do?
In the story, our girl loses her feet in the process of removing the crazed dancing shoes. And likewise, after long enough dancing to the beat of the wrong life, it becomes part of our identity, and the only way to separate from it is to lose some mobility and part of ourselves.
It’s painful, and the pain is only a relief because frantically living the wrong life was worse.
Suppose you were an accountant who desperately wanted a career change. You could quit being an accountant, get rid of your boxes of paperwork and business cards and special spreadsheets. But you might also lose part of yourself too – your accounting friends, your clients, your steady income, your sense of yourself as a steady reliable person.
Taking off an identity you’ve had for a long time is a bit like pruning tomatoes. Each branch is part of you, each is full of possibility.
But as the gardener, you have to make choices for your plant about which branches you want. You cut some that are weaker, younger, diseased, so that the healthy ones have the best chance of growing. You might make cuts to change the shape or encourage fruit growth.
The point is that just because something is a potentially fruitful part of your identity, it doesn’t mean you have to keep it. Or get rid of it. You get to choose what works best for you.
But any pruning does leave a wound, and does change direction, and it is always a little scary trying to decide what you can cut off and what is best left alone.
Learning to Feed Our Souls Again
But most importantly, like victims of a famine, we need to learn to feed our souls again. To carefully resist the tendency towards the excess of the starving. To identify and slowly build our capacity for safe soul-food again.
That means reaching for creativity, nature, honest relationships, and simple joys, noticed, appreciated, hand-fit into a life that you define for yourself. A little at a time.
We must find, thank, and politely dismiss all those voices telling us to sit straight, be proper, don’t need, don’t feel, don’t falter. And then feel, and need, and falter, and laugh wildly barefoot under the full moon.
And then, like the child we once were, we must carefully collect the scraps, and sew our own, handmade life to fit.
I think it’s a process.
I don’t have a “successful creative business” today. But I’m building one. One that fits me and my strange, wild life, not someone else’s path.
And I know, like all good pairs of handmade shoes, it’s something I’ll have to sew one saved-scrap at a time. Meanwhile, I’ll revel in the sunrise and the smell of dew-covered trees when I forage for my breakfast in the garden.
What Does It Mean for Finding Meaning in Life?
Here’s the good part.
This story tells us not just that meaning feeds us, or that having a life on your terms is good for your soul. Although both are true and important.
It tells us that you don’t just find meaning.
There is no one big answer for “what is the meaning of life?”
Instead, we find scraps of meaning. Scraps of purpose. Scraps of our answers.
And our most important job is to become someone who notices.
Who sees the possibilities in the scraps. Who collects them. Who dreams and strategizes about weaving them together into something more. Then does.
A meaningful life isn’t something you CAN find. It’s something you have to build, from the scraps of meaning and wonder and joy that you can find.
Through noticing. Appreciating. Collecting. Storing. And carefully knitting together one bit at a time, day by day.
Just Focus On Your Feet
My favorite advice for hard times is this: “Don’t think about tomorrow. Just focus on your feet. Take the next step. And the next.”
And what do we see down there but our shoes (or our wild bare feet)?
Feeling lost and directionless, sometimes, is a marvelous opportunity to focus not just on how we walk, but on how the way we walk through life can BE an identity that truely feeds our wild child soul.
Sometimes, being lost is what we need most to learn how to see, how to notice and appreciate what matters, and to care enough to weave it all into what we need most.
A life that feels right in the living.
I don’t know where I’m going. But I’m trying to learn how to walk, and how to spot and collect scraps to feed my soul in the process.
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