“Walk on water”, she said, and as I exorcise these demons of distortion, a phrase came to me, ‘Discipline amidst the dysphoria equals Dissonance.”
A client sent me a free ticket to a Virtual Conference on Digital Technologies. She said she had a free ticket and she thought of me because of the newsletters that I send out. As part helpfulness, and part self-promotion, I send my clients newsletters. I usually do them in series, when I want to share a specific theme of information. On the day I decided to start the last series that I did, I was having a day much like this one. A ‘woe-be-me’ day, a ‘nothing-is-going-as-I-hoped’ day.. These are the days when I feel dissonance – when I am working daily, and the fruit is not yet in front of my eye, but I am still toiling, because discipline produces fruit, so the work continues. Her free ticket is a seed, if not a fruit, but I almost declined the free ticket, until I realised that these are the reasons I work. I work to continuously adjust my positioning – this conference will help with that, so why say ‘No’…out of self-pity?
My business is on a great upswing, but once again, it is because of the work I am putting in and not because of the fruit that I am seeing. There are challenges in this mode of operation – one being that you can feel at odds with the discipline. You can feel so far from where you are walking toward, that you tell yourself that staying in this place might not be so bad. You can’t see the shoreline you left and you can’t see the shoreline you are heading toward.
At the end of our conversation, which was a lot of me explaining all the reasons that I cannot and should not take time out of my day to attend a conference when I am pushing hard to finish work and get paid for it, she simply said, “Thank you for taking the plunge despite how you feel.”
“Walk on water.”
And she left me with that.
The dysphoria comes from my morning glance into the mirror – seeing myself 6 pounds lighter than 3 weeks ago. All the eating and weight gain had pushed me into a softness, a thickness that in a lot of ways still feels very feminine and thus, very uncomfortable. I think subconsciously I rejected the weight gain and pushing through it became scary, because again, I can’t see the shoreline that I left, and I can’t see the one I’m moving toward. In the middle of what seems like nowhere, on the heels of discipline, I am only seeing fog.
I no longer look like the image in the picture. To a body type like mine, 6 pounds is a lot. However, to a business like mine, a free ticket to a virtual digital conference is also a lot.
‘Walk on water,’ she said.
I will.
I will.
JanBerry 