How to Create Your Purpose

I spent a large part of my late teens and early twenties feeling extremely disconnected from this world. In fact, when I come to think of it, I was largely disconnected throughout my entire life up until the age of 25 when I embarked on what some people might describe as a ‘spiritual awakening’.

When I say that I was disconnected from this world, what I really mean is that I was disconnected from myself.

There were times throughout my childhood when I was labelled as ‘too soft’, ‘too sensitive’ or ‘too emotional’. I was called all kinds of nasty names by the men that were supposed to be showing and teaching me love because I didn’t live up to what their idea of a ‘man’ was.

Men should be angry. Men should drink and take drugs. Men should spit on the floor in public. Men should ‘own’ their women, physically and psychologically. And men most definitely should not display their feelings and reveal emotions to the world.

I wished that I was someone else for much of my childhood. I craved acceptance from these men and I often wondered why I was so ‘weird’ for being the exact opposite of what they wanted.

I spent much of my teens and early twenties disconnected from reality and escaping into different worlds via computer games, pretending that I was the characters inside of them. Most of my friends were finding, or already half way along their paths by this age. I ended up following the crowd, trying to play catch up.

I went to university. Failed my first year. Went back to college. Stayed there for a month. Went back to my old university town for a party during freshers week. Decided to stay a little longer and ignored all of the phone calls from college. Signed back up to redo my first year and left the college. Proceeded to drop out of university after a few months. Got a job stacking shelves to pay off some debts. Partied a lot more. Took a few holidays with the ‘lads’. Stacked shelves for six years. Applied for the Royal Marines. Got deferred for a year because of an operation. Found a girlfriend. Thought my life was made.

I was 24 when this relationship began. It was my first and I thought that it would be my only. My first step father always told me that I would find a beautiful blonde girl, marry her and live happily ever after. I thought she was ‘the one’. It ended for good after 9 months when things became a little too serious for her. She was with another guy just a few weeks later whilst I was lying on my bed crying into my pillowcase wondering what on earth to do with my life now.

I was 25 years old. No money. A car that I could barely afford the repayments for. Dead end job with no prospects. And now I was alone with absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I was lost.

Love can change a person. Thank god, it changed me.

The heartbreak sent me into a very deep state of introspection. My questioning process began. I began peeling back some of my many layers to get down to my core. I decided to reinvent myself. Twice. The first version of me that I built after my heartbreak was one centred around rebuilding my ego. I posted photographs of myself in the gym as a statement to the girl that hurt me. I had an awful lot to prove. I wanted to ‘be a man’. Strong. Stoic. Untouchable. The second version? Well, that’s me. The child behind my masks. Emotional. Sensitive. Vulnerable.

Finally, I think I have found my true self. Or, perhaps I have spent the last six years creating him.

Either way, I want to share some of the advice that has brought me this far on my own journey towards peace and love. Maybe it can help you along on yours.

Spend more time alone

Find your very own quiet, happy place where you can read books, listen to yourself and write down your thoughts.

I recommend finding a place outdoors in nature where the sounds help you to relax and the environment provides you with a sense of neutrality to reset.

While you are there, ask yourself why this is your favourite place. Dig deeper into your answers by asking even further ‘why’s’. Think about how it makes you feel. Think about any memories that are tied to the place and why those memories are special.

All of these questions will help you to reach a deeper level of self awareness. Detach from yourself and start having a two way conversation in your head and in your journal, if you wish. It might seem strange at the start to talk to yourself in this way, but persevere and you’ll be grateful for it one day.

This is how you begin to think like ‘you’; the real you that is, the one that exists behind the many masks that have been placed over your face by society, by parents, by bosses, by friends, love and trauma. Which leads me nicely onto my next point…

Figure out who ‘you’ are

Answering this question requires a lot of hard work. To be honest, I don’t think that the questioning process will ever end. How could we possibly figure it out completely when we are always changing, growing, and evolving to newer versions of ourselves?

How do you know who you want to be if you don’t even know who you are right now?

A good way to begin answering this would be to ask, who was I in my purest state as a child? What did I naturally gravitate towards? For me, I was always drawn to books and stories. Reading books came as naturally as breathing to me from a very young age. I was years ahead of my classmates in the books that I was reading at four years old until one day, I decided to stop. Between the age of 4 and 25, I picked up just one book through a conscious choice of my own.

I believe that this change of course in my life was caused by some of the emotional abuse that I received from my step father at the time. My expressive actions and some of the characteristics that I possessed were met with name — calling and bullying. He didn’t like my sensitivity and emotional nature. ‘Men’ didn’t show emotion, or express their love in our home.

I put down the books and picked up a Playstation controller to try to be more like him, in the hope of finally gaining some approval from the man that I looked up to.

Read more books

Books have been ever-present for the past six years of my journey and I am so glad that I finally re-discovered my love for reading. I owe them so much for their help in stripping back my ego and becoming myself. It is within books that I have found wisdom from some of the greatest minds on our planet, characters that I love; finding similarities between myself and many of them, and many role models and mentors. I base many parts of my life around the characters that I find within books.

Santiago, the little shepherd boy from Andalusia, has taught me dream and to leave my baggage behind and travel freely in search of my treasure.

Leonardo Da Vinci has taught me how to be curious about everything. Never to ‘know’, and to always remain a student of life.

Joseph Campbell has taught me the importance of ‘following your bliss’, which I talk about further along in this blog.

It is inside of books that I find similarities, and differences, between myself and others, forcing me into a much deeper level of self-awareness.

Books have helped me to find and, perhaps, even create many parts of my identity.

Journal

I know. The idea of sitting and writing something down on a piece of paper is terrifying.

‘What do I write?’

‘It just feels weird!’

‘But I can’t force myself to ‘be grateful’.’

Let me tell you this; the one thing that has changed my life more than anything is the act of sitting in silence and waiting for something to come into my head, and capturing the thought on paper. It can be anything. I just write it down. Everything that you read in this blog has been a result of my sitting at my journal in silence for an hour at 6.30am, sometimes even longer if I find my flow.

What do you want to achieve in life? What skills would you like to acquire? Who would you like to be in 10 years time? Business ideas. Gratitude lists. To-do’s. Dream places to visit… Get them all written down.

There is something seriously magical about getting all of that jargon out of your head and into the physical world. It is like you are convincing yourself that it can all become real when you put it out ‘there’.

Get this, towards the beginning of the year, I wrote in my journal that I would like to exhibit my photography work twice in 2022. Literally four days later, I received an invitation from a local gallery space asking me if I would like to run an exhibition.

Now I’m not saying that I made this happen through some crazy telepathy, but the act of consciously saying, ‘I want this to happen’ brought it into my conscious from my subconscious and made me jump at the chance when the opportunity arose.

Recently, I wrote that I would like to create more portrait photographs of people. A few days later, another email (which I might normally have skimmed over) arrived in my inbox, asking if I was available for hire to create some portraits.

Boom! A payday. And I made that happen.

If you don’t determine the course of your own life, you better believe that there is someone out there in this world that is going to use you for their own purpose. Why do you think that there are so many miserable employees working at large corporations for bosses that live out at sea on a yacht? Because for generations, we have accepted this as ‘normal’ and we haven’t been taught that we can literally create our own future!

Sit down, find your quiet place and begin to plot your course today.

Do more of what you love

Explore. Hike. Draw. Sing. Dance. Create. Run. Build. Sell. Talk. Listen. Understand. Whatever it is for you:

‘Go where you feel most alive!’

Listen to that voice inside. Some people call it God. Others Allah. Some will call it your higher self. I don’t personally care much for labels. That voice is you! Listen to it. And go there.

Find ‘the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet’

By finding something that you love and linking it to something that the world needs, your passion and purpose becomes much bigger than something that you do for yourself, and that becomes very powerful.

In the beautiful fable ‘The Alchemist’, which I have now read six times, author Paolo Coelho writes passionately about ‘The Soul of the World’.

We all have a responsibility to add our own version of ‘good’ to the world to make it a better place for our own souls to exist.

There is a beautiful quote from mythologist and writer Joseph Campbell, who writes passionately about the human experience, particularly what he calls ‘The Hero’ Journey’, which has been credited by George Lucas as influencing the Star Wars saga:

“Follow your bliss.
If you do follow your bliss,
you put yourself on a kind of track
that has been there all the while waiting for you,
and the life you ought to be living
is the one you are living.
When you can see that,
you begin to meet people
who are in the field of your bliss,
and they open the doors to you.
I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid,
and doors will open
where you didn’t know they were going to be.
If you follow your bliss,
doors will open for you that wouldn’t have opened for anyone else.”

We owe it to ourselves, and to The Soul of the World to find our own bliss. For me, personally, that means that I have to take photographs, write and create my art for the good of the world, and not only for myself because ‘I just really enjoy being in nature’, or whatever selfish reason that I might have attached to it at one point in my journey.

I grew up with three men through different chapters in my early life who severely damaged The Soul of the World, and now I feel a responsibility to repair the wounds that they caused, firstly inside of myself, and then to other souls that exist within this world.

Become curious

What lies around the next corner? How will you know if you never look? Curiosity will change your life. I’ve managed to create some of my best photographs by taking ‘just one more step’ in a woodland or along a mountain path

Some of the most amazing people who have ever lived possessed an infinite amount of curiosity; Leonardo Da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin and Isaac Newton are just a few that I enjoy reading about.

As children, we are naturally curious. We pick objects up and wonder. We ask questions, we play and we explore. Parents have a bad day at work, or run late for a meeting and they tell us to stop; stop asking questions, stop exploring in the garden, stop singing so loudly because ‘I can’t concentrate’. We go to school and teachers instruct us to ‘sit down, fold your arms, cross your legs and listen to what I have to say’. Questions are not encouraged, and then when they are, our friends laugh at us because we have asked a silly question, or they tell us to be quiet because they want the lesson to end as quickly as possible, and so we stop asking questions through fear of further judgment or disapproval.

Curiosity is beaten out of us in this life with a very shitty stick!

Start asking questions again; of yourself and others and watch your life change. Learning about other people is one of the best ways to learn about ourselves, in my opinion.

Turn your pain into power

We have all had our fair share of struggles in this life. I’ve talked a little bit about some of mine throughout this blog and I plan to share more in the future. Everything that we have ever faced has forged us in a fire. All of our challenges have provided us with our own unique strengths and abilities.

I learnt through photography that my deep sensitivity allows me to view this world in a way that is unknown to many. At one point, as mentioned above, I would run from this part of myself. I thought that sensitivity made me weak. Now I embrace it as my greatest strength. I see beauty in places that other people might overlook. I embrace my emotions and allow myself to be moved by our natural world and then, I turn it into art.

Creating art is a part of my purpose, as is writing, educating and understanding and helping others. I’m still learning about many of the things that pain me and I can’t wait to find out what they are because I want to know what other superpowers I possess.

Don’t you think it’s interesting that Spiderman had to get bitten first so that he could shoot webs and jump from building to building saving the world from evil?

Finding your purpose requires work. But better to do your own than that of someone else, right?

It has taken me around six years of work to get to this point, using all of the points that I have listed above. Behind every successful person is a backlog of work that they have done to find out who they are and what their purpose on this planet is.

It is up to you to put in the work to find out what your own unique superpowers are and what you can bring to the world.

Finding your truth and purpose requires courage. It requires going against the status quo and perhaps even losing a few friends along the way. You will find yourself sailing in the wrong direction from time to time, maybe even ending up in the wrong port but at least you are living a life of exploration and adventure and learning plenty along the way.

Be patient. Persist. Keep asking questions of yourself and searching for the answers. You will find your port one day.

I’ll be there waiting for you.