An Extraordinary Existence

As I prepare to begin the second semester of my sophomore year of college this coming week, I’m laying in my bed having just put down Eat Pray Love to write this. It’s been a while since I’ve shared something on my blog, or even gone into detail about my life on my Instagram. I’ve been writing, of course. Mostly for a longer form piece that I’ve been entertaining. But I haven’t had the same overwhelming bouts of inspiration to write as I did during this past summer. I still get them occasionally—those all-consuming calls to write. Like right now, for example. But mostly it’s a scheduled thirty minutes a day of writing, which I do partly to keep my skills sharp but mostly to remain attentive so that if a wave of magical creative inspiration does happen to come my way, I’ll be able to catch it.

 I’m only a paragraph into this piece, so I’m not sure if what I’m riding is necessarily a wave of magical creative inspiration, but I’ll know soon enough. 

I felt called to write about where I am right now. Not geographically. Although, if you must know, I’m in Nashville, writing this from my dorm room. But more so, I mean where I am emotionally and spiritually. 

You see, this past summer, I had this incredible spiritual experience. For months it felt like my feet were rooted so deeply in the Earth that my heart and mind were able to fly like a kite, so high up and so free that I wondered if I’d ever feel tethered to anything again. Those summer months faded into the first semester of my sophomore year, which was fantastic and fulfilling. I’ve found that being at school intensifies my feelings of wholeness, a feeling so pure and rare that it feels addicting. The fall was amazing, and I felt intensely present and light. 

Now, just so you know, this isn’t going to be a story arc in which I start by building all of this goodness up, and then pull the rug out from under the reader, and say gotchya, my life went to shit. My life is still magnificent. Magical, even. I recognize that I, along with the rest of the human population, am on a great adventure. A great adventure on which I have met many incredible characters and found beautiful connections with places, people, and things. So this isn’t a story about how I experienced a spiritual come down, although I’m sure that can happen.  Rather, this is a story about reflection, introspection, and at its very roots, this is a personal effort for me to understand where I am at, and to remind myself of how beautiful this place that I’m in now is. Of how beautiful the past year and a half of my life has been. This is an invitation from me to me, and consequently an invitation from me to you, to take a minute (or many minutes) to yourself and sink your feet so deeply into the ground of the Earth that your heart and mind may have the privilege of feeling weightless once again. 

…

I recently had a dear friend reach out to me about my sobriety. I have been sober for nearly eight months, most of which have been spent still attending college parties and casually explaining to people that I don’t drink, leaving it up to them to either wonder why that is, or to take the road less traveled and ask me why. For those who do ask me why, my answers vary from: “It just doesn’t serve me” to “I’m happiest when I’m sober” or the rare and occasionally pretentious sounding truth, “I just think that if you want to live an extraordinary life, you need to do things that ordinary people don’t do. So I made the decision to become sober and to see where it gets me.” 

If you want to live an extraordinary life, you have to do extraordinary things. 

Let me be clear on one thing: I have no desire to be special, or to be made special because of my lifestyle or beliefs. Being special only creates separateness. Seeing as I believe my life’s purpose is to foster connectedness among people, being special isn’t exactly on my agenda. But living an extraordinary life doesn’t mean being special. And I don’t feel bad for saying that many people do end up living ordinary lives. Believe it or not, some people are actually wholly content living very ordinary lives. And to know that people trust their path, however ordinary it might appear, means more to me than ensuring that every individual who lives and breathes is pursuing the extraordinary. 

The key word in “if you want to live an extraordinary life, you have to do extraordinary things” is the word want. Like I said, not everyone wants to live an extraordinary life. Some people just want to live and do their thing quietly and experience plentiful amounts of joy and then die peacefully. 

In writing that last sentence, I realized that it’s actually pretty similar to what I want out of this lifetime. I suppose that’s because it’s quite ordinary to want things like joy, connection, and peace. And the extraordinary path is not the only way to get there. In fact, you can take a very ordinary path and experience those things, just like you can take an extraordinary path and be entirely miserable if you don’t stop to take in the magic along the way. But I digress. 

I want my life to be extraordinary, and I want it to be abundant with magic, and love, and adventure. I’m very clear on those intentions, but until this friend and I had a conversation about the deeper why of my sobriety, I realized I’d been sacrificing some of  the magic and adventure—the fun—in my pursuit of the extraordinary. 

This friend of mine has known me for long enough to truly know me and they weren’t testing my sobriety or challenging it, but they were expressing curiosity about something greater that they understand exists within me; which is, as I’ve witnessed it, a willingness to forego aspects of my youth and instead put my head down and work towards the extraordinary life that I want to create. 

This story has very little to do with sobriety, and this conversation didn’t change my decision about remaining sober, nor was it ever intended to. In this instance, I choose to see my sobriety as a symbol. The reason I am so drawn to sobriety is because my life, and the things I have gone through during the past few years, have been utterly sobering. They have drawn me so deeply into the present, even when that presence is so painful and gutting, that to attempt to pull myself into a substance induced trance, however temporary it may be, would be pointless to me. My sobriety, for the purpose of this story, should be understood as a symbol of the sacrifices that I am willing to make, and the sacrifices that I have made to create the life I now live. 

As soon as my friend touched on the fact that I might regret being so serious about my future right now and sacrificing part of my life that I won’t get back, I was honestly just impressed. It takes an incredibly perceptive person to notice that kind of thing. Most people just call me disciplined. I think there are other, more celebratory words I could supplement that description with: driven, ambitious, focused. But at the root of my drive, or ambition, or discipline or whatever you choose to see it as, there exists a unique willingness to sacrifice my youthfulness for a rather unorthodox path: working full time in college, becoming sober, distancing myself from romance, foregoing social events for work. 

It’s like living a life in which you are constantly in the post break-up or post-disaster stage of “working on yourself.” And what I’ve found through personal experience is that when you “work on yourself” for long enough, after a while you surpass the self-care stage of working on yourself and all you’re really doing is working. 

So that is where I am at, now. I am at the point where I’ve realized that “working on myself” has evolved into my own addiction to working, because somewhere in my reasoning mind, I believe that if I work hard enough—if I put my head down and make the sacrifices that other people aren’t willing to, then I’ll wake up one morning and my life will be extraordinary. 

And I’ve also learned that my decision to do all of this is actually one that stems partly from healing, and partly from trauma. Moments and memories of instability that I’ve held onto, rooted deep in my very body and subconscious mind, have stuck with me—so subtly and yet so powerfully—that the reason I’m willing to sacrifice so much of my youth is because the child that exists within me believes that the only way to feel safe in this world is to be independent. The child within me has been afraid that if I were to pump the brakes on my progress, the well oiled car I’ve engineered will stall to the point of failure. And although I’m incredibly proud of where I am in life and what I’ve created, I want to relieve the part of my heart that so desperately craves stability.

All it took was one conversation, one friend, noticing that sometimes people like me need a reminder, from someone outside of themself, that in between our goals, there’s a precious thing called life that is meant to be both lived and enjoyed. 

That’s where the magic is. 

An extraordinary life is one that is lived fully, in pursuit of moments of joy, both big and small. It is a life that trades in fear for faith—a faith that life is inherently extraordinary no matter which magnificent direction you decide to take yours in. So long as you live your life in a way that fills your heart with love, your very existence is extraordinary. 

So, if you’re like me, and have found yourself prioritizing progress and perceived success over actually living, then I invite you to join me in setting my intention for the next few months: to pursue joy, nurture the practices and relationships that fill me up, and finally, to remind my inner child that I am safe.

 I forgive myself for the habits and beliefs that I developed when I was simply trying to survive, and I hope that you can do the same for yourself. I am releasing those things and holding space for new habits, new beliefs, new relationships in this next season of life. 

You are safe, you are loved, and you are extraordinary. 

All of my love and a little bit extra, 

Cail