You ready to hear this?
Please sit still and stop quivering for just five minutes, I instructed my insides. On a sunny summer day, I sat facing the sparkling Chicago river from 36 floors up. Perched between the river and me was a high-powered VP of the company flipping the pages of an extensive PR plan I’d drafted.
I wanted to crush it. To knock this one out of the park. She sat back in her swivel chair, uncrossed her arms and blatantly offered: “I think what we need to be asking at the end of the day is: who’s our audience?”
Ah, the phrase professionals live and breathe by. Marketers, sellers, storytellers, anyone who wants to “make it stick.”
“Remember!” the little soldier on my shoulder still says, wagging her finger in the air when I write this blog or draft an article or post to Instagram or shine something up for special delivery, “what is it they want to hear?!”
Ooof. No wonder it’s taken me almost 10 years of life coaching to peel back those layers. A type of un-learning to realize that yes, the audience— lots of times— is “out there.” My readers, clients, neighbors, friends, family. They’re all worth knowing.
AND, while living inside this body, isn’t my audience also, like, 100 percent of the time … me?!
Let me open the door here. We’ve all had that sort of dreaded sense of knowing that we have to do something even though it’s gonna suck. We get pelted with signs and reminders from every angle that a living situation isn’t working for us anymore, the relationship needs a come to Jesus conversation, the topic we’re avoiding in therapy is the one that needs discussing. But that’s gonna take work, we howl and kick and scream. That’s anything but what I want to do! It’s like a split-body moment: your gut knows, but the rest of you just … isn’t quite on board.
So we la la la dee da and hope it’ll disappear (not speaking from direct experience or anything ;) ... until it doesn’t. That’s when the [whisper an expletive] moment lands: sometimes, it royally stinks to know. That ignorance often really is bliss, isn’t it? And why did we ever trek all the way here to get to know ourselves better, anyway?
It happened when I returned to Chicago from an epic solo trip to Hawaii in 2021. That reintegration-back-to-real-life phase comes with any magical experience. But that multiple weeks-long fog of gray post homecoming told me in a “last straw” kind of way that, no, Katie, you can’t just keep pretending this city is still a good fit. The clarity that came from the contrast between being free and light and totally myself in my element against feeling constricted in a highrise within a concrete jungle was sparkling clear. It meant I had to roll up my sleeves, find and dedicate time! Money! Energy! Lots of my sanity!
If, that is, I wanted to honor myself and what I needed. Which sounds so self help book-ish. But damn if it isn’t true.
It would have been so much easier to stay and please. To be convenient. To give it “just another year.” When everything in me said: you just can’t do that anymore. Unless I wanted to shrink myself further into misalignment and set myself up for misery.
Intuition, as turns out, doesn’t work around convenience.
So one morning while on my recent trip to Thailand volunteering at the elephant sanctuary, Nikki and I sat across from each other once again sharing notes of what messages we each received while we communicated with the elephants. She had just had a long conversation with Vanda (sounds like “Wenda"), a confident gal who got straight to the point having spent years being forced to haul logs and heavy machinery in her pre-rescue life. The chain marks on her legs said what she often couldn’t out loud.
“I asked if she had any advice for you,” Nikki said. I stared wide-eyed, eager and also squirmy, not sure I was ready to hear it. “But she said matter-of-factly, ‘Send Katie to my office. I want to tell her myself.' ”
Well, just GREAT. Here was a professoinal animal communicator who had delivered hundreds of messages from animals to humans, and I was the one outlier?! Summoned back to a high-powered office. Cool. I pictured Vanda like that VP in front of the shiny windows, only with wire-rimmed spectacles perched above her trunk and a giant bookshelf with a roaring fire behind her.
So when I was by myself outside one morning, I summoned the courage to connect with Vanda in meditation. What I heard made both my heart sink and enlarge:
I’ve spent my whole life pleasing people. You don’t need to do the same.
I’m at the point in my animal communication journey where sometimes, it's still tough to decipher which thoughts are mine and which are the animal’s. But during this conversation, it really didn’t matter. Whether it came from Vanda, which I believe it did, or some higher power or wisdom somewhere inside me, the message was clear enough.
Being in the company of a dozen beings whose voices and dignity had been overlooked and cast to the side for decades was enough to remind me not to take my own voice and ideas and freedoms for granted. Because yes, my inner straight A student still wants to crush it. And you know what? So many times, she is. (Good job, girlfriend!)
When I write my life according to how I want someone else to absorb it, it kind of feels like being shackled. All that energy dragging the weight and waiting for non-guaranteed applause and validation – doesn’t it just strip energy from excavating what I have to say in the first place? And WHY I'm doing it all to begin with?
Alright, I know that’s deep. But what would you expect from life in The Deep End, eh? Enjoy this story? Consider joining my email list where subscribers get first eyes on my blog entries + personal notes from me.
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