Are you the responsible one?

The Weight of Responsibility

Your Journal Prompts This Week:

What does the word responsibility mean to me & how does it show up in my life?

What do I tend to take responsibility for that isn't mine?

How could I take greater responsibility for my own joy, happiness, and fulfillment?

I'm currently in a group that is working it's way through The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. In week 2, one passage really struck a chord with me:

"Often, creativity is blocked by our falling in with other people's plans for us. We want to set aside time for our creative work, but we feel we should do something else instead. As blocked creatives, we focus not on our responsibilities to ourselves, but on our responsibilities to others. We tend to think such behavior makes us good people. It doesn't. It makes us frustrated people." - Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way, page 43.

Shauna Niequist also talks about the weight of responsibility in Present Over Perfect, and she declared she was done with taking on the identity of the Most Responsible One: 

"I'm done with that kind of responsible. I don't want to get to the end of my life and look back and realize that the best thing about me was I was organized. That I executed well, that I ran a tight ship, that I never missed a detail." - Shauna Niequist, Present Over Perfect, page 197.

These both resonate with me because I've spent most of my life trying to prove how responsible I am (and maybe you have, too). I was taught that to get ahead at work, I had to do everything I could to make my bosses look good, to make sure they had everything they needed. I tried so hard to do that, but as Julia says, I became a very frustrated person. This led to an incident that my husband refers to as the "F*** Stacy" moment. Stacy (whose name has been changed to protect her true identity), was the C-suite executive my boss and I reported to. During a particularly challenging week at work, my boss sent me an email that said it didn't matter what anyone else wanted or suggested, so long as "Stacy was happy."

I was so frustrated in that moment by those words that I read the email aloud to my husband and then shouted, "F*** STACY, *I* WANT TO BE HAPPY!!!!"

I'd like to say that I learned a major lesson in that moment, that I never let a false sense of duty or responsibility to someone else overtake my responsibility for my own happiness . . . and in some ways, it was a turning point. I did get a new job after that. But that habit of being the responsible one is hard to break, and I still come up against it today. But now I'm starting to see it for what it is.

So if you are finding it challenging these days to take care of yourself, to do the work you really want to do, to create happiness within and for yourself, I wrote the above journal prompts. 

Let's reexamine and redefine our relationship to responsibility, then see what happens! (And if you've ever had a "F*** Stacy" moment, I'd love to hear about it!!)

With much love & gratitude,
Marcy

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