A Girl on a Mission

Two days ago — July 26th, 2021— I was driving home from Tupper Lake in Upstate New York with three of my best friends. Somewhere on this blog exists stories about these particular friendships and the exceptional bond we have. That’s not what this is about, though. The seemingly tangential praise for my lovely friends serves as something of a segue into our collective favorite travel activity: the famous road trip questions. The road trip questions began this past winter when we found ourselves frequenting long drives with more life-subjects to talk about than good music to listen to. Each empty gas tank in need of filling felt more than worth it for the profound conversations we began having. It didn’t matter if the trip was eighteen miles or two hundred — you could almost always count on tears being shed or revelations being had in the back seat. The list of “101 questions to ask on a road trip” that had made its way to the top of the search results when we googled “good questions to ask your friends” would change our lives more than we ever could’ve imagined. 

It’s been nearly a year since we first blazed through every list of questions we could find on the internet, so we’ve gotten creative. Sometimes it's questions off the top of our heads like “what are your real hobbies?”and other times its existential wonderings like “does anyone actually know how to wash their face without turning their bathroom vanity into Aquatica?” My point here being: we thought we’d exhausted every possible question that we could think of. I already know all of my closest friends' favorite colors, and probably their deepest fears too. I could describe in detail each of their perfect days or what their last meal would be. But we were in need of more prompts, and seeing as I usually spearhead the group interview and have taken a liking to moderating them, I went to Pinterest to see if any self-development loving millennials had graced the semi-infamous app with questions of their own. 

After typing “questions to get to know someone” into the search bar, and subsequently waiting as my phone plan battled the come-and-go wifi provided by the gas station we chose to stop in, Pinterest generated the results I had hoped for. At the top of the screen was a perfectly aesthetic, pink bordered list titled “31 Journal Prompts for Personal Growth.”

Upon returning to the car, I began asking the questions listed. First was: “what do I need more of in my life?” We each answered, working off of one another’s responses and digressing so far that we nearly forgot the original question. When I remembered that there was a list of perfect, pink, script questions guiding this conversation I opened my phone to the list once again, and we moved on to the second. “What do I need to let go of?” read the second question. We answered as you’d expect: toxic relationships, stressful thoughts - the like. Onto the third question we went. 

3. “What are your limiting beliefs?” 

My eyes lit up and I readjusted my posture, sitting up from my bundled position in the passenger seat to fully engage with the conversation we were about to have. I sometimes wonder if my friends can tell when I’m really about to go in on something — like when someone brings up gut health or astrology and they know it’s just music to my ears. I can feel my soul heat up when I start talking about self development; like I’m rolling out a red carpet of answers for myself as I go along speaking, learning from myself with each sentence I form — so this was an exciting moment for me, albeit in a mini-van at 8 am on the New York Thruway, still in my pajamas. 

This “What are your limiting beliefs?” question in particular appealed to me because I had just done an exercise days before on the exact subject, and it was mindset-altering. I was excited to see what my friends believed was holding them back from their fullest potential, and if we could somehow work through their limiting beliefs the same way I had started to mine.

I began the conversation by proclaiming the beliefs that I felt had been holding me back in every area of my life; things that I had allowed to fester in my mind for years — formed by those sneaky voices that tell you you can’t do it or nobody will ever love you. 

My limiting beliefs were as follows: 

I’ll never be as successful as I want to be; success will somehow evade me. 

Everyone else will find their success except for me; there’s a formula I’ll never learn. 

I’ll never live my dream life - instead, somebody else will and I’ll be forced to watch them do it. 

I’ll never want to work as hard as I need to to do the things that I want to do. 

I’ll never be in a lasting romantic relationship; I’ll panic and run from what makes me happy. 

I’ll just keep saying I’m going to do things, but I’ll never actually do them. I never actually do them. 

I’ll give up on my blog the same way I’ve given up on other ventures.  

I won’t fall in love during college. 

As I explained these limiting beliefs to my three friends, I was genuinely surprised to hear that I wasn’t the only one who felt these things. My friends too had limiting beliefs, as we all do, but to hear that some of the thoughts holding them back were nearly identical to that of my own, was crazy. I’d never felt so seen as I did when my friend said “You just articulated a feeling that I’ve been experiencing for years - I just never knew how to put it.”

I continued: We all have limiting beliefs. We all have nagging voices in our head telling us that we’re an impostor undeserving of our own happiness or that nobody will ever think we’re beautiful or that we’re bound for failure and embarrassment in everything we do. These voices are relentless — you’d think they’d get exhausted, but clearly, they’re getting paid for overtime. It’s like each of their absurd thoughts that we believe, they get a commission. Mean voices in our heads using the affiliate-link model? I get enough of that on social media, and I think I’d like to be the sole operator of my own mind. More of a small business up here in my head, thank you very much. 

The most critical part of overcoming these limiting beliefs is acknowledging what they are. What are the thoughts holding you back from the life you want to live? The life that you think only exists in your dreams. What thoughts are holding you back in your finances, your relationships, your career, your self-image? Until we know what these thoughts are, we can’t disprove them — we can’t put them down on a piece of paper and read them back and see how ridiculous and false they are. 

But once we acknowledge them — once we take out our journals or our notes app or whatever medium you choose to document your personal growth journey with — we take back our power. We take back our power because we can then see that it's not us who has formed these discouraging, limiting beliefs about ourselves. It’s our ego. And when we can look at a thought formed by our ego and not by us that says something like “Everyone else will find their success except for me; there’s a formula I’ll never learn” we realize that it’s not true. We realize that it’s only true if we choose to believe it is. 

But it’s not always easy to believe it when we tell ourselves all the amazing things we can do. Sometimes it’s just easier to allow our limiting beliefs to take over, because at least we know that our limiting beliefs won’t encourage us to make some great leap of faith towards our goals and fail miserably for everyone to see. But I’m committed to making sure that myself, and anyone reading this, does not follow their limiting beliefs into a life that is too small for them. I’m committed to inspiring each reader to believe in themselves instead of in the bullshit their ego has told them. 

I’m not a resentful person. I detest violence in every capacity. I haven’t experienced anger in months. But when I tell you that writing out my limiting beliefs, seeing them on paper and then disproving them was THE most empowering fuck-you moment I’ve ever had — I mean it wholeheartedly. I looked at those disheartening, false beliefs and mentally, I squashed them. You have held me back for too long, and I am taking back my power. I am rewriting my internal narrative. 

I’m going to be as successful as I want to be; my success is inevitable. 

I will find success along with millions of others; collectively we will make the world a better place. 

I’m living my dream life and I am creating my own reality. 

I am willing to work as hard as I need to to achieve my goals. 

I’ll be in a lasting romantic relationship; I’ll love fully and lean into what makes me happy. 

I’m going to achieve my goals quietly.

The creation of my blog is a huge milestone in my growth. I will feed it my energy so long as it serves me.  

I will fall in love during college: with my life, with people, with learning, with myself. 

I turned to my friends after going on what felt like a breathless rant about limiting beliefs, talking about the same things you just read, and I told them that I want to be successful. I want to achieve my goals, and I know in my bones that I can and I will. I know deep in my soul that if I want something, I can create it for myself. I told them: I don’t want to be successful so that I can be rich and have material things and feel like I’m filling some void of financial inferiority. I want to grow to a level of financial abundance because I want to change people’s lives. I want to give meaningful donations to schools with dwindling endowments so that more people are given the opportunity to a nourishing education; I want to fund writing programs and mental health initiatives for people of all ages; I want to invest in small businesses in the wellness industry that I believe in, because I firmly believe that people shouldn't have to tip-toe around grocery stores wondering if the item they’re buying has additives that could give them or their loved ones cancer down the line. I want to inspire people to own their stories and understand that they’re capable of whatever they put their mind and energy to. 

I told my friends all of this, and as the frequency of my words increased and my heart rate quickened due to this monologue about my life’s purpose, I slowed down and said: “I shut down my limiting beliefs because that was the only way to move forward. I had to leave them behind. I was tired of being held back.” Through a little bit of laughter and plenty of conviction, I concluded: “ because I am on a mission.” Cliche as it may sound, those words sounded almost prophetic when I spoke them aloud. 

My friend looked back at me, half laughing and half stunned at what she had just witnessed, and confirmed: “You are.” 

So whenever I feel discouraged now, or those fearful voices and limiting beliefs creep into my consciousness, I will remind myself of my purpose. I will remind myself that I want to help people heal; that I want to extend safe haven to people I may never meet and change the lives of people who may never know my name. When I struggle to recall my why, I will simply remind myself that I am A Girl on A Mission. 

As you finish up reading this, I encourage you to open your notes app or grab a pen and some paper and ask yourself: what is my mission? Maybe you won’t have an answer just yet, or maybe you’ve had one since you were six. Maybe there’s no concrete image of “your mission” in your mind, but you know that you’ve got loads of potential to do incredible things during this lifetime. So, humor me here. Take out your journal and write the date at the top of the page with the title: “what is my mission?” and write out your goals, however big or small they may seem. Those goals provide the framework for your mission. Then, skip a few lines and write out your limiting beliefs — the things hindering you from stepping into your purpose; the beliefs that convince you out of the pursuit of your goals. Write them all down. 

Once you’ve written out your limiting beliefs, and you can see them in stark contrast with your goals, I urge you to sit back and reject every limiting belief you noted. One by one, go through this list of dream-killing thoughts and disprove them. Say it out loud if you want to — these beliefs are not mine, and they are not true. Write down the counter-beliefs to your limiting beliefs the way I did earlier. For instance, if you believe “I’m emotionally unavailable”, flip the narrative. Affirm “I welcome emotional expression and I feel comfortable being vulnerable with people I love and trust.” If you’re having trouble mentally disproving these beliefs because you’ve internalized them over the course of your lifetime, think about it like this: if some random person came up to you, unprompted, and said “you’re never going to be successful”, you’d be like “what are you talking about?” and while, yes, perhaps you’d be slightly offended, you’d brush it off quickly because that random person’s comment had no basis in reality. They don’t know what you’re capable of. Your ego’s thoughts are the exact same way. They’re random, have no basis in reality, and deserve absolutely no attention. 

So I invite you to join me on this journey, another step together in owning our stories. In doing this exercise and acknowledging your limiting beliefs, you take back your power from your ego, and assert yourself as the sole author of this story that you are writing each day.