Over a delicious lunch a week or two ago, I asked my friend the fateful question: "How are you? ...really." 

She leaned forward and said, "I mean, really?..." and spun a tale of 14-hour days, no weekends, round the clock demands, high stakes, and pressure after pressure. "I know it's just going to be like this for a little while..."

Oh. No. 

"You know that's not true, right? You know it's going to be like this forever and ever, until you decide to make it stop, have a life, and take care of yourself." 

This is the extent of my wisdom after 15 solid years of rampant workaholism, working my little fingers to the proverbial bone for nonprofit after nonprofit, business after business. It was always: "I just have to put a little extra time in this month," and "soon it will slow down."

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Yesterday, I posted a mini-rant on my Facebook wall about how sick I am of seeing everybody’s exact formula for anything because exact formulas only work for hacks. So if you are a hack, great. Apply someone else’s exact formula. For the non-hacks among us, you can’t do it that way. Perhaps that’s the only wrong way to do business – expecting and hoping that someone else’s success can be exactly replicated even though that is impossible because you are not them, in their exact place, with the exact people they know, with the exact social and systemic structures that support and undergird their cultural power, with their exact face and energy and list and on and on and on, (you get me)…

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We all carry Great Lies that guide our lives. They come from someplace - and one key place they come from is from the Myth of Original Sin. Hear me out.

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In 2014, I left an amazing job as a nonprofit director. I loved the work. I cared deeply about the mission. And at the same time, I was enmeshed in it - it was what I thought defined me...that, and my other roles - longsuffering (read: unhappy) wife, mother, worship leader, a leader in general, and on and on. I had built myself a castle in the shape of what I thought I was supposed to look like and took up residence.

But eventually, that castle was too small for all of who I am.

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