On Trusting Your Timing When You Had to Make Your Own Way

bringing independence-seeking, trailblazing parts back into rhythm with life

Perfect Lovers, Felix Gonzalez-Torres

“It is wise in your own life to be able to recognize and acknowledge the key thresholds:

    to take your time, to feel all the varieties of presence that accrue there,

to listen inwards with complete attention until you hear the inner voice calling you forward.”

-John O’Donohue, Thresholds

I spent most of my twenties suspended between two metaphorical ages that felt drastically older and younger than twenty-something.

On one side of the spectrum, I was an old soul

with older friends who couldn’t relate to her peers. I got clean from opiates at age 18 and grew up quickly, both from things I saw in my addiction and things my recovery asked of me. I lived on my own since then, save for a few stints at my parents’ house, which which was always the last resort for me when a crisis or break-up happened and I needed to lick my wounds. I took great pride in my independence and doing things on my own. I hated accepting help — I didn’t want the strings attached and I didn’t enjoy the feeling of compromised dignity. It made me feel dirty, like I had to admit to my most sacred values that I failed them. The valuable life skills I learned during this time I learned with a baptism-by-fire mentality. This experiential acquisition of knowledge was already familiar to me as a parentified child: I started working at an early age, babysitting as soon as someone trusted me with a child, and taught myself to drive and parallel park without a licensed adult in the car so I would be sure to pass my driver’s test. I knew all about growing myself up and I relished this self-image of maturity, competency, and intelligence.

On the other side of the spectrum, I was a late bloomer

who didn’t go through necessary rites of passage that my peers took for granted. Because I had to learn on the fly, I often missed putting foundations in place that bit me in the ass later. I never learned how to balance a budget properly because I never had enough stable income to pay the bills. I never walked at my high school graduation and didn’t go back to school till I was in my late twenties. I never learned how to plan for my career, leverage my professional contacts, or build a social network strategically, skills I didn’t even know existed until I saw friends offering friends interviews and job opportunities. I prioritized short-term markers of success such as a higher hourly rate for freelancing work over long-term gain such as in creating a positive professional reputation. I learned these lessons of adulting by falling flat on my face, when it was too late to undo the shame-laden mess and apply what I learned retroactively.

In my early thirties, this juxtaposition still follows me but shows up in less drastic ways. I don’t fall flat on my face as much, or take nearly as much pride in my independence, but I do suffer from a warped sense of timing that I think a lot of people who relate to growing up quickly also grapple with. I pressure myself to make up for lost time and compare myself to people my age who don’t have my history. For me, this doesn’t surface as regret or a woe-is-me self-pity mentality, but instead shows up as an incurable urgency and restlessness of spirit that pressures me to achieve more, spin my wheels faster, and be more persistent in getting what I want.

The message my parts took from learning things the hard way was never trust the process, or respect the right timing, but try harder and don’t give up.

This insistence on my vision is admirable in many respects but it is adaptive, and as such, its roots touch my wounds and wrap around all kinds of beliefs about survival.

I think this is true for many parentified adults who learn resilience and grit as survival functions: we don’t know how to naturally rest in a relationship with timing that is generous, gracious, and gentle.

We prioritize destination over process, volition over Providence, and then re-enact the tragic dynamics of self-reliance where we fail to get our wishes met fully and apply more self to a self-made problem. This shows up as taking on more responsibilities than we can really handle, saying yes to an opportunity before the safeguards are fully put in place, or diving into a project without a plan that could ensure minimal stress or risk.

What I’m learning in this season of my life is that the cost of managing my life like this is not just perpetual hypervigilance, chronic dissatisfaction, and un-integrated mistakes that I repeat over and over, but it is also a poverty of relationship with Time.

I don’t experience the nourishment of being held by the Tao, or the way of what is natural, when I force my will on circumstances. When I live in self-imposition, I live only in what I can see and control. To trust Time, however, I must be vulnerable. I have to accept my impermanence and limitations despite what my independence-seeking parts think and want. There is something life-enriching and soul-expanding about this act. It’s nothing meager or cheap. It takes real surrender.

Irish poet John O’Donohue speaks to the generosity of Time in his book To Bless The Space Between Us. He writes,

“The beauty of nature insists on taking its time. Everything is prepared. Nothing is rushed. The rhythm of emergence is a gradual slow beat always inching its way forward; change remains faithful to itself until the new unfolds in the full confidence of true arrival.”

We miss the rhythm of emergence when we insist on the agenda of urgency.

I miss what is being prepared, what unfolds, and what arrives in the fullness of itself when I insist that I’m 33 and should own a house by now and be fully licensed and make more money and, and, and…

Trusting timing can feel contradictory to our natures when we have learned that survival equates to blazing our own paths. What I’m learning in working with these parts of my history is that letting my path take shape naturally instead of wrestling, bulldozing, and fighting for the things I want when I want them yields me something beyond the object of my desires: it gifts me with a lesson that I can fully integrate and honor in the subsequent living of my life that restores me to the quiet wisdom of Self, the consciousness that holds all parts.

We can learn to trust after our parts convinced us we needed to be self-starters to be safe. We can allow the seasons of our life to take shape and do our part in tending them rather than resisting their iterations. We can balance our desires with realistic needs, our personal values with life lessons, our urgency with the greater story of living we’re all contained within. We can come into rhythm with time and discover healing in allowing what is space to simply be.

~Sarah

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Journaling Prompts for Self-Starters & Trailblazers

When did you first learn that you had to rely on yourself to meet your own needs?

What were the consequences of letting life happen for you?

Were there times life delivered circumstances to you that felt cruel or unfair?

What did you make that mean about life?

What are some of the strategies you adopted to meet your basic/logistical needs?

Were there ever times when these strategies backfired or required upkeep at a high cost to your self concept, values, or relationships?

Consider your relationship with timing (the way in which life unfolds for you): what are your major regrets? grievances? losses?

Access your inner wisdom: we have what our parts make up about experiences in life, and then what these experiences are trying to teach us. What were some of the unexpected lessons these experiences gave you? How can you honor and express them today?

I would love to hear your experience with this post or these prompts. Feel free to leave a comment here if this resonates <3