Searching For Fullfilness Within

I had dinner tonight with a friend of mine who I admire and respect.  He's on my shortlist of people I wish I could perform as well as when on stage.  For everything going so well for the both of us, we both have our own respective follies and insecurities to contend with.  I feel we're sort of kindred spirits in that vein.

The thing that I realized I look for is outside validation instead of going within to get it.  It stems from issues I have with never really getting what I wanted from my father.  I wanted to always be loved and accepted as I was by him, but never felt I really got that from him.  so, a lot of my initial motivations are to get to the point people will love me and accept me.  For example, I went through a long week of "creative withdrawl" after my run with Specter of Treason finished.  I took two days off from myself to recover and then on the third day, I felt the familiar twinge of being creative beckon.  Then by the following weekend, I was fighting myself from trying to get into another production.  The motivation behind getting into another production was not because I felt creative unsatisfied but rather because I knew I was doing it to get people's attention and adoration.  So, I basically called myself out a number of times on social media to sort of shame myself into doing the opposite (not the best way to do so but it worked).

My friend is gong through the same thing in his life as well but his need for love and acceptance differ from mine in motivation and result.  The similarities in our situations was so strong that I gave him my "worldly" answer for dealing with his problems:

• Find Your Passion(s)
  As I've gotten older, I've really started analyzing what it is I want to do with my life and what I wish to spend my limited energy on.  I realized that only those things that I am passionate about are worth pursuing head on.  How do you know you're passionate about something? You're willing to kill, maim, and destroy anything in your path to obtain your goal ;-)  That's how much the desire must burn to achieve the  desired outcome.  Do this first and as soon as possible.  It will frame the next  item.
   
• Pursue Your Passion Incrementally
  A great day consists of a series of great moments.  Don't get caught up in planning the path of the outcome necessarily ("the how") but rater focus on the goal ("the what").  Break your pursuit of a given goal into smaller goals and focus on each on o f those goals from the onset.  Don't worry about how you're going to achieve each goal but rather the journey to get there.  This is incredibly hard to do even for me.  I get caught up in the drama of the pursuit of happiness a lot.  I'm working on going back to not planning a darn thing and allowing things to "just happen" again.  I was a lot happier and cherished each moment much more.

After our chat tonight, I know we both feel a tiny bit better about our futures.  Gotta keep working on these concepts and reinforcing them until they're second nature.