The Art of Surrender

I love having a plan. When I have a plan, I’m in control. And when I’m in control, my desired outcome is totally certain.

In other words, I love to lie to myself to feel better about the fact that nothing in this world is certain.

I found this out the hard way three and a half years ago when I quit my job before I had a new job lined up. If I wanted to, I could have stayed. But I was actively interviewing at two companies and believed I was a shoe in at one of them. I’d nailed my interviews, I jived with everyone on the team, and it seemed like the perfect fit with where I wanted to go next in my career. Not working would allow me to show up to any additional interviews less stressed.

So I took the leap and waited for news.

And waited. And waited.

Turns out, they found someone with more experience than me right at the last second and hired him instead.

The second job fell through as well and for the first time in my life, I didn’t have a plan.

Fortunately, I had enough savings to get me through until my lease was up. And while I desperately applied to job after job (and in turn got rejected from job after job), I spent a lot of time lying on the couch surrendering to something greater than myself.

I would lie there and say:

Open the doors that are meant to be open

Close the doors that are meant to be closed

And keep me in the center of your perfect will.

This is a prayer my homeopathic practitioner learned from a priest she used to know, and it lends perfectly to the concept of surrender.

See, we humans tend to get an idea of how things are supposed to work out. We force our way through doors because they promise financial success / fame / relationships / ease. Sometimes they even bring us what they promised, but it doesn’t feel as fulfilling as we’d hoped. And sometimes we don’t get what we want and we assume there’s something wrong with us. Meanwhile, down the hall there’s an unlocked door that we never even imagined was possible. Maybe it wouldn’t have brought everything the first door promised, but it would have felt a lot more fulfilling.

Essentially, that’s a summary of how I’ve lived most of my life. When I wanted to go to a “good college,” I forced myself through AP classes I hated. That’s when I started having health issues. When I wanted a “secure career,” I signed up for computer science even though I longed to do something in film. I tacked on animation in the hopes that would satisfy the desire to tell stories. It didn’t. At my first job I switched roles five or six times because I couldn’t find something that satisfied me. I would cry on a regular basis because I didn’t know how I was going to get through a whole career of the blah and grind I faced every day. At my second job I quit after working there a year because it was so chaotic, then chickened out and stayed another five because I didn’t believe I was capable of getting another job (in particular because I didn’t think I could feign enthusiasm for another role in tech, and what the hell was I going to do if I wasn’t working in tech?)

So “surrender” wasn’t even a word in my vocabulary. My ego wanted to throw up at the mere suggestion that something else might have a better idea of what to do with my life that I would. But all of the forcing and pushing and controlling hadn’t worked. In fact, it had backfired at every turn and left me physically, emotionally, and mentally in a terrible place. So it seemed worth a shot.

Now, surrender sounds like you just sit there and do nothing and something magically works out. That’s not it. You’re taking action, you probably even have a loose goal in mind. But you’re also listening to something (you might call it intuition or God or Spirit or whatever your preferred term) to help guide the actions you’re taking. Sometimes those actions are terrifying and you don’t want to do them, but you do them to the best of your ability. And, most importantly, you accept the outcome of those actions as the best outcome for you. Even if you hate it.

Spoiler alert: I hated it. Because my journey was filled with rejection after rejection. Every single one made me want to curl up and shrivel into the useless pile of nothingness that I felt I was. At one point, I found the job I was sure was “the one.” It seemed like this was the reason for all those rejections and it was worth it. Then someone else got it and it broke me. It was so hard to trust that a door would eventually open when so many door were being slammed in my face. It felt hopeless.

And then I got an invitation to interview again at a company I’d been rejected at a few months before. To be honest, I barely tried because I didn’t trust that anything was going to work out. And then I got an offer — to do contract work.

For the next three years, that’s what I did because that was the door that opened.

It felt less than ideal, but funny enough it was exactly what I needed at that point in time. I needed more time and space to heal from years of forcing myself into situations that were the opposite of where I was being guided to go. I also needed enough money to pay my bills, and this paid enough to do that. Sure, it didn’t have benefits and I was pretty constricted in my budget for a few years. There were many times my ego had enough of not being recognized for the work I was doing (which, according to everyone I worked with, was essentially full time work) and I plotted to force a full time offer. In hindsight, though, I can see I needed that time to continue doing even more healing work and contemplation.

By the time a full time offer came through (funny enough right as I decided to give up that it would ever come), the ulcers I’d developed four and a half years earlier were almost completely healed, I’d developed boundaries with work and a healthier sense of self-worth, and I had a sense of direction and purpose that felt right for the first time in my life. I wouldn’t have gotten there if I’d had a salaried role where I could (and would) have worked every waking hour of the day to prove myself.

Surrender feels scary because we don’t know where it’s going to lead. But that’s also the beauty of it. When we control the pieces, we’re playing a game where we can only see a sliver of the board. The choices we make often only serve the short term (and kind of suck in the long term). Letting someone who can see the entire board guide the strategy means that the short term might not make sense, it might even hurt for awhile, but eventually we’ll get a more fulfilling result than we could have even imagined for ourselves.

We just have to be willing to relinquish control and let go of any hope of certainty.