Your Unique Pattern Of Love

I’ve already got some loves and loathes. If your unique pattern of loves and loathes was indeed completely malleable. If you really could acquire any skills or attributes you wanted if you just practiced enough. If growing up really just meant growing out of your loves and replacing them with whatever uniform ones your school or work required. Her sister didn’t want to do that, and she didn’t want Myshel to do it either. And that need never went away. None of Donnie’s students are empty vessels. They authentically share with him because, finally, someone is seeing them. Someone is allowing them to say, Hey, this is me. Please look at what’s inside me. And don’t correct me. Don’t tell me how to break my patterns.

Barely Hanging On

Help me see my patterns. And then, maybe, you can help me know how I can make the most of them. For me, for Myshel, for those students, for all of us, it hurts so much to be unseen. Well, it can’t continue this way. Each one of us is different. She was referring primarily to racial and economic inequality, but her insight applies more broadly. Schools and workplaces that insist on treating all of us the same are sources of oppression. Now is the time to stop this oppression and devise better schools, more intelligent workplaces. It’s up to all of us. And it begins not with these institutions, but with you taking your own loves seriously. What follows is a road map for how to do that. How to embark on your journey, the names of the devils you’ll meet along the way, and the tools you’ll need to outwit them.

Who Cares

So, saddle up, strap in, and let’s go create for you a more powerful, more authentic and more loving way of living. They were blessed with some wonderful gifts, but because of luck or circumstance, never found a way to share these gifts with the world. They lived a good life, perhaps even an affluent one, but it was, in some important ways, a lesser life. Not a waste, to be sure, but a life nonetheless of opportunities not taken, of uniqueness unexpressed. Maybe this person isn’t someone in your life. You’re coasting along, doing fine, the job’s manageable, the bank account’s relatively healthy, but something’s missing. You put in your time at work, but it’s the company’s time, not your time. Your successes at work feel hollow and you don’t know why. You find yourself resenting the praise you get at work, the knowledge you gain, even the money you make. And you don’t know why. It’s a strangely awful feeling, isn’t it. As if you’re a passenger in your own life, watching the world slide by, without ever getting out and taking action in it.

Make That Connection

And how about the opposite? The actor Ken Jeong was a decade into his career as a physician of internal medicine when he decided that his love of performing comedy was so strong it could no longer be repressed. Chow in the three Hangover films, and he has appeared in a number of other movies and television shows. He had carved out a respected and lucrative career in corporate finance, but swerved away from the comforts it offered to devote herself to reducing the gender gap in computing skills. She left her investment firm and founded the nonprofit Girls Who Code. Do you have someone in your life who took their loves as seriously as these people did? Can you see what they saw in themselves? Can you see the choices they made, how they figured out ways to use life to fill themselves up rather than wear themselves out? Can you see how they lived such a full life? Yeah, it’s a bit of a mystery, isn’t it. Referencing people like this makes living a full life look far easier than it really is. Even if you do know someone who’s followed what they loved, it isn’t always clear how they did it, nor whether they are an example you can actually follow. Their timing, their choices, and, of course, their specific loves were utterly unique to them, so which parts of their story should you graft onto your own? To help you find yourself again and thrive in a life that feels fully your own, you’re going to need to learn a new language, your love language. As with all new languages, at the outset it’ll feel a little odd, like the new vocabulary and grammar are obscuring rather than revealing your world. But after a little practice, quite soon your fluency will pick up and you’ll find yourself able to make sense of a great deal that used to be mysterious. Becoming fluent in your own love language will help you know which choices to lean into and which to avoid. It’ll help you mold your existing job so that it calls upon the very best of you. Or describe yourself so clearly in job interviews that you stand out from all the other candidates. Or choose the right role on a team. Or position yourself as a leader in such a way that your followers quickly come to trust in you. Or, on occasion, take stock of your current role and decide that this loveless job is completely wrong for you. The very first word to learn in this language is Wyrd. It’s pronounced the same as weird but it’s a noun, as in You have a Wyrd. It’s an ancient Norse term, the idea that each person is born with a distinct spirit. This spirit is unique to you, and guides you to love some things and loathe others. Having a Wyrd doesn’t mean you don’t learn and grow during your life. It means simply that you will learn and grow the most when you’re in touch with this Wyrd and honor where it leads you. Today we don’t need spirituality to confirm the existence of your human life.