I need to get to the bottom of something. It’s an age-old mystery that every human has to solve for themselves, and I would put it up there with the question “what is love?” It beffudles and confounds and it halts a lot, if not most, people in their tracks. It has frozen me at the moment.

I am trying to solve the mystery of my purpose.

People who are sure of the thing they want to do are so enviable. Those people who are driven by a single-mindedness, or whose love for something is so profound there simply is no other answer. The pianists who know that music is what they want to create, doctors who want to save lives, CEOs who know that they need to be on top, or athletes whose body is genetically engineered by God to reach heights that are simply not possible for any other. I am jealous of their certainty, of the obviousness of their reasons.

Personally, I know where my talents lie. I’ve been able to use these talents to earn money throughout my life – writing articles, hosting events, teaching, and other things that involve some form of speaking or performing. I’m a fast learner and I can learn to do things really well. If I had the desire for it, I’d be a pretty rich person, I think. I know I’m more than capable. I just don’t care enough for money to lose sleep for it, you know what I mean? I just never had that dream – big house, cars, branded things. It is NOT bad to want those things, it just doesn’t fill me with any kind of fire.

What does drive me – and this is going to sound dramatic – is the act of making something out of nothing and then affecting people with that creation. Writing an essay, or choreographing a dance, recording a podcast! You don’t have to force me to do anything that’s creative, because even just the idea of being asked to create makes every cell in my body come alive.

It sure sounds like I know what it is I want to do, so what the heck am I so confused about? Dear reader, if there is a reader out there, know that I am discovering things as I type out each letter. Clarity comes to me as I write, or talk about something that is a tangled mess in my head. So I know as much as you do.

It seems like I know I want to create. I want to make. I want to listen to my body and let my mind flow and wake up knowing that a blank, empty page or canvas is awaiting me. If I could spend all day just thinking and making, or conceptualizing with other artists, I would do that. The potential of nothing becoming something brings me so much excitement I could cry.

So why does it feel so…. selfish? To think about doing something just for me makes me so uneasy. Why is that? Why do I think that putting my family above all things is the only purpose I serve, at the expense of my own personal joy of creating? This is a conversation I’ve had with my husband time and time again. His desire is for me to have a vision for my life and to do what needs to be done to be able to fulfil that vision. If that means giving up real estate and my other business ventures so I can focus on just creating and raising our family, then I should do just that. I have his full, and total support. “How can you give your all to our family, if you never fill your cup? What can you give if there is nothing to give?”

I’ve prayed about this incessantly. God, please make it clear. Can you please pave the way and make it obvious what I should do and focus on? What is Your will? PLEASE! I’M SO CONFUSED!!!! But I think I God is trying to get me to make this decision on faith and trust and hope. Maybe He is teaching me to listen to a very, very quiet voice because my head is way too noisy. Maybe He is teaching me to be quiet, because I can’t seem to hear the answers.

I think I am mistaking doing something well with being meant to do something. But I guess success doesn’t always equate to purpose, does it? And doing something just for myself doesn’t always have to be fill me with an existential guilt so deep I can feel it in my bones.

Perhaps the mystery isn’t my purpose, but how to find peace with it when the purpose doesn’t look like the world’s version of success. When it means affecting just one or two people instead of a nation. Maybe purpose is, and always will be, entangled with uncertainty, so that you rely a whole lot on faith, hope, and love- the three to always remain in a world full of noise.