Trying to Get: Giving Ourselves What We Need and Already Have
By Jennifer Paros
“What you seek is seeking you.”
When I was twenty-one, freshly graduated from college, I was offered an internship at a small publishing house in San Diego, whose unique children’s books I greatly admired. I’d written a novel for children and studied visual art and was thinking this was a logical step that might lead to a job. They accepted my proposal and I drove to San Diego, rented a studio apartment, and stayed for three months. But overall, I wasn’t happy. I’d strategized to try and get something, but wasn’t really there for the actual experience; I was there for the future security I thought I should try to get. But in striving to connect the dots to a job, I had failed to connect me as well and was strangely absent from the picture.
After the internship, I returned to Seattle, distressed about what kind of work to pursue. Eventually, exhausted from doubting myself and trying to figure out my life, on an impulse, I interviewed for part-time work at a daycare. As I approached the large room filled with 30-40 four and five year-olds, a little girl named Ella stood before me wearing a dress and a long strand of large beads, her straight brown hair cut short and blunt with bangs. She greeted me as though she were the prime minister of a small but dignified country and took me in. Ella had much to say and I was interested. As I sat across from her and her friends, without trying to get anything, I discovered both a new world to love and more of myself.
Sometimes we act as though we’re operating with a deficit and look outside ourselves for what we think we need in order to feel happy, safe, and secure. We may believe our unhappiness is due to the fact that we’re not finding or getting what we need. But the act of trying to extract what we think we want from life is painful, frustrating, and disempowering in and of itself because by nature, we are creators, not extractors. Everything we need is in us already, waiting to be grown and lived out in the world.
Recently I was reflecting on how at times I feel ill at ease after social gatherings (not usually during). My mind replays interactions with people, searching what they said and did, how they looked at me, what I said, did, how I presented. It seems to be an attempt to shake validation, approval, and reassurance from whatever I think happened. It is this mental process that leaves me uneasy – not the actual socializing. In trying to find reassurance, I stir up insecurity. Even if I had many lovely interactions, unlovely things are “found” because when we try to get something, we experience ourselves as needy and lacking, which then becomes the lens through which we perceive our experiences.
“Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy. ”
Trying to get keeps us running. It focuses our attention everywhere but inside us. We think we’re running towards what we want, when, in fact, that which we’re working so hard to obtain has become an elusive enemy. Our real desire to experience the relationship, to write the book, to do the job, to buy the house – whatever it is – is no longer leading the way. Seeking reassurance from the achievement now compels and controls us.
When we write, we don’t chase ideas, we envision and feel, and accept all the ideas that fit with what we most want to share. Instead of trying to get, we receive. We invite visions, characters, and ideas in. If we try to force something from our experience, we no longer authentically engage with it, and can no longer freely create. Feeling safe is central to creating; when we allow ourselves to be more fully who we are, we give ourselves that sense of security. The denial of our own authority is what makes us wobble and compels us to look outside ourselves, when what we seek is actually in us, awaiting our acceptance and permission to be expressed.
This morning, I awoke with the phrase “Give to yourself” running through my mind. I take it to mean to be generous with consistent acknowledgement of our good, our value, the uniqueness of our selves and our dreams – to accept all of that about us. As we give to ourselves, we’ll be less inclined to try and shake life to get, released from the painful belief that we don’t already have – because we’ll know we do.
Jennifer Paros is a writer, illustrator, and author of Violet Bing and the Grand House (Viking, 2007). She lives in Seattle. Please visit her website.