The past few days I’ve had a shift in awareness of my current life circumstance.

I have really struggled internally on-and-off with my current line of work in tech, feeling that it isn’t perfectly aligned with my passions and therefore is somehow wrong or bad, or that I’m living a lie by working this career path.

It sucks holding that thought. It makes me feel like I’m a bad person, and that I’m trapped in a life that is somehow not meant for me. It makes me suffer from that all-too-common-apparently “Imposter Syndrome”. It is a way of focusing on the negative rather than the positive.

There are lots of ways to flip perspective; for me it happens often when I allow myself to fully surrender into an emotional breakdown. I’ve had many an emotional breakdown over different varieties of this particular thread of inner self-torment. My inner child will just… collapse, at the impossibility of the predicament I feel myself to be in. I cry, I feel like shit for a little bit. And then something shifts, the load lightens, my perspective changes.

That happened this week. I had a rough few days at work – due to my own patterns, I really can’t blame my job at all! – and just ran out of energy completely. I had to take an afternoon off to sleep and cry. And when I woke up from that, I had a new perspective.

It was this: my tech job is a part of a life configuration that feels very womb-like.

My life right now is a womb.

In this womb, I am being held and taken care of while I develop the skills and readiness for whatever life I will be birthed into next. My tech job is a huge part of that, financially sustaining me, helping me develop skills and relationships and roots in a place I love, and helping me get to know myself better. I’m being very well taken care of and nourished inside this womb; I have lots of flexibility to choose my own particular path of growth. It’s quite amazing, actually – I think I’m still getting used to the amount of freedom I am granted. I think it’s still a little bit scary, like maybe I don’t actually trust myself to make good use of that freedom. Which makes me think even more, that this is a good place for me to grow right now!

I’m laughing at myself though, because I can extend this womb metaphor into my whole life. When COVID hit, I felt like we were going into a collective cocoon of inner reflection and transformation. That metaphor also feels very womb-like. In fact, I can see my whole life as a fractaling pattern birthing me from one womb into another, infinitely, forever.

Maybe it looks something like this, in the fabric of my unfolding life Universe…

My mother’s womb was obviously a womb. My childhood under my parents’ roof was a womb. College was a womb. My relationship with Mathew, or any ex for that matter, was a womb. And now, my life in San Francisco, living in my own apartment, working my tech job, connecting with my family, and doing all kinds of wild inner growth work with ecstatic dance and various online and in-person communities… is another womb. I’m always stretching to grow to fill the container I’m planted in, until I’m ready to make a leap into something new. The seeds of an idea for the next pot I will be planted in… are already here and growing.

But like anything, I can choose my perspective on what that means. The old me would look at that as evidence that I’m in the wrong place right now. That’s the source of my ineffective negative thinking about how working in the tech industry isn’t really “true to me”. The new, more optimistic and healthy and happy me… is able to appreciate the womb I’m in that helps me grow into wherever I’m meant to be next.

And the time will come for change. I don’t have to force it. One day I’ll probably look back and miss the comfort of the womb I’m in right now. So I might as well enjoy it while I’m here 😉