In 2008, two five-year-olds changed my life.
One of my first jobs after college was teaching ballet to young girls, and one semester I met two girls named Ava and Stella. Each week, Ava arrived to class with a big, bright smile and shining eyes. She would raise her hand and exclaim: THIS is the class where we make magic in every moment! I love this class! I LOVE what we are doing right now!
Her enthusiasm was contagious, reminding me of my own—I, too, want to leap into life and art and shout about how rapturous it all feels—but I had abandoned that part of me in my early 20s obsession with looking effortless, very cool, and not taking up too much space. Though my enthusiasm felt as big as the universe, I had learned to bottle it up. So I walked through life split in two — my real self was overflowing with life and feeling, and my social self, as Martha Beck calls it, learned how to perform smallness and not care too much.
Stella’s curiosity was unstoppable. She was always first in line, excited to show me what she had been practicing. Her words couldn’t keep up with her passion and I knew this so well in my own body I got goosebumps. But I had become embarrassed by the size of my curiosity, so that, too, had gotten tucked away.
One day, Stella walked into class changed. As if she had been told to leave all of her passion at the door along with her street shoes—she suddenly had an overwhelming self-consciousness that seemed to say: My full self has become unpalatable and insufficient for the world. From now on I will only give you the packaged bits.
Her eyes darted around to see how she was measuring up, she looked at her body in the mirror with disdain, she stood at the back of the line, and she was afraid to try anything new.
From that point forward, Stella had no more questions.
Stella’s curiosity wound had formed, and I noticed her reverse blossoming in almost every girl I taught. And in me, too.
At some point, we receive the memo from the world that we are simultaneously too much and not enough.
This is an impossible double bind that keeps us perpetually creatively stuck and diminished, and, as a result, mislabeling that stuckness as our own inadequacy and shame to carry. But the real issue is that too early, we are told to turn the dial down on whatever most makes us who we are, because it doesn’t fit in the box we were instructed to stay inside.
Two questions kept me up at night:
WHAT HAPPENED TO STELLA? AND HOW DO WE GET HER BACK?
I spent the next 17 years devoted to this question. Because we are all Stella and Ava.
Despite the messaging that’s been hammered into us, your too muchness is your best thing. Those parts you were told to hide are your GIFTS. Every time we want to expand creatively, we have to reclaim a lost part of our original spark.
All The Way Up
Who were you before the world told you who to be?
Brilliant, visionary creators enter my coaching practice every month with big intentions for both their leadership and their creativity — sell a tv pilot, grow a business or podcast or body of music, write a book that cuts through the noise — while also showing up steadfastly for their kids, teams, elders, pets and communities.
The question we begin with: What and how did you love to play when you were little? is not a fluffy, icebreaker question, but the origin of our work. I want to know about who you were before the world told you who to be, because not only is it a source for your most original creative work, it is also the regenerative fuel that keeps us from burning out in the process.
Staging musicals with my dolls. Drawing with the moon. Creating shops for the neighborhood. And then — what were you taught is too much about you?
Too loud, too bossy. Too wild. Too sensitive. Too weird. My answer: Too concerned. Too curious. Too enthusiastic.
Before we design a plan for her expansion, we create the space for her to reconnect to the part of herself that knows that her too muchness is not only welcome but the way. And we create the safety for her to turn her original spark — her unique constellation of desire, enthusiasm, and curiosity — all the way up.
Then we rigorously prioritize the protection of that spark over the endless cultural pressure to be cool, contained, and certain.
Safety first, because neuroscience tells us that we can’t feel curious until we feel safe. All the way up because this unlocks our most alive creativity.
Especially as our lives and careers evolve and we feel like we are nonstop adulting. The stakes keep getting higher, and it can feel harder to feel safe to connect to this part of ourselves, and believe that it won’t get us into trouble.
Because even though we may conceptually understand that our too muchness isn’t a bad thing, our bodies and nervous systems may hold onto a story that we are doing something wrong when we take the lid off of our full expression. So we skillfully contort, diminish, and downplay our full selves and become practiced at sharing only certain packaged bits.
The Curiosity Wound
Stella’s trust in her curiosity and passion had been wounded. Healing it begins with reconnection, and this can be an antidote to whatever blocks may be coming up for us: self-doubt, holding back, fear of what people think, confusion about what’s next.
The culture wants to sell us a complex 10-step solution to these problems so it can keep us under control.
But the secret no one wants us to know is that we are the solution.
It’s you, hi, you’re the solution, it’s you.
Invitation #2: Reconnect to your Original Spark
3 Prompts:
1. What lit you up in your earliest years? What were you curious about? What is lighting you up in this season of your life? Where is your curiosity trying to lead you?
2. When did you learn to turn down your curiosity or enthusiasm? What were you taught is too much about you? How is this showing up in your creative life right now?
3. What’s possible if you turn your spark all the way up?
Consider journaling with these questions, or placing a photo of yourself as a child in the place where you do your work, or returning to a creative love for 15 minutes with zero expectations or pressure for results.
Try this: Invite your Original Spark to a current challenge or block and see what shifts.
Let yourself be amazed.
Let yourself be lit up.
Let yourself be curious again.
For multiple decades, I truly thought I had lost my spark, but I had not. I just couldn’t connect to it. And if you resonate with this, consider that your spark isn’t gone, but waiting for you.
Because even though our spark may get minimized, banned, or dimmed by a world that is threatened by our power, it never leaves us.
The survival of oppressive systems depends on us staying disconnected from our spark and believing the lie that our too muchness is the problem. The system wins when we stay in the box.
Perhaps one way to look at this moment in our collective history is that it is time to unfurl our most creative, curious, unapologetic, wild selves. And we know how to do this. We just have to remember.
What if your too muchness is a gift?
What if your spark is the key to your next chapter?
What if it’s a key to these dystopian times?
What if it’s time to turn ourselves all the way up?
Love,
Liz
PS: I talk about more about this in my TedX on how to grieve our childhood dreams. You can watch it here
Resources + Actions:
-
I love Money With Katie and I especially loved this conversation with Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, about her book The Double Tax and what it costs to be a woman and a person of color in our culture
-
Watch my incredible client Lorena Martinez’s beautiful Tedx about the life-changing joy that comes from reconnecting to the magic of our inner child
3 Quotes on my heart and mind:
1. ”The world is violent and mercurial — it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love — love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.”
— TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
2. “What part of me did I tuck away in order to make other people feel comfortable?”
— DR. THEMA BRYANT
3. “You are your best thing.”
— TONI MORRISON
Image Credit: From Verses After Dusk by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
