Tick, tick… Boom! is the first musical I ever watched till the end. I usually hated musicals but something drew me into watching this particular one. Maybe it was the intense scarcity of time to produce your best work. Maybe it was finding a passion/purpose that is so powerful, you can’t look away. Clock keeps ticking with the grand expectation of something big approaching…
Now that I look back, I think it was my “rebirth” that kept on ticking louder and louder until the Boom! which put my ass on to therapist’s couch. I started hearing the ticks after graduation when I started my long fantasized career at the exact position I wanted. I was a highly passionate person with big dreams. I imagined being the force of power in the meeting rooms. I was so determined to prove I belonged there.
First tick started on my first day at work. Small whisper saying “Is this really what you worked towards your whole life?” Since it was the first tick, I easily ignored it. Ticks just continued to come after every hangover in the weekends, every overnight work, every corporate meeting that could easily been an e-mail, each gossip I was ever part of, every attention I begged from a man, every stress signal from my body, every sleepless night my mind torturing me with all the things I was not doing enough. The ticks kept on coming stronger & more frequent. It was becoming so hard to ignore.
Ignorance and hiding took all my energy. I was living in constant denial & numbing just to keep the volume down. A bottle of wine on Fridays and weekends packed with activities. Ever increasing credit card limit to pay for all of this “But hey! Why did I work so hard if I wasn’t going to be able to enjoy & have a bit of fun, right?” Each imaginary money I spent was depositing from my soul. I felt emptier & emptier.
The ticks were accompanied by a sentence that burned my skin. That sentence was a big bonfire, if I get closer I would burn. “There has to be more to life”. I kept on ignoring the ticks until they were the only thing I could hear. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick and BOOM! An anxiety attack that caught me off guard. There was no turning down the volume now. There was only the constant heartbeat, the nausea, the heavy chest, the brain fog, the feeling of too much. Just too much. I feel too much.
Each person’s ticks are trying to tell them a different story. All of us have different calls to change. This newsletter is for people who started to hear the ticks. The ticks of change. The ticks of something big coming. The ticks that you ignore because it feels safer to stay the same.
This is the invitation you have been waiting for. Acknowledge the ticks. Get curious where life is trying to take you & what change its asking you to create for yourself.
But for now, just acknowledge you hear the ticks and something needs to change.
With love,
Flux