It is not only my right and my privilege to walk in the abundance God has for me, it is my responsibility…just as it is my responsibility to live the rest of my truth. — Jan Denise
I am not responsible for your happiness and you are not responsible for mine. This is some very powerful freeing stuff I am learning.
This is not an accusatory statement, but one of personal responsibility. I was explaining this to a friend earlier tonight, but first let me give you a little bit of background.
About twenty years ago I was living in Los Angeles, I had been in the entertainment business almost five years. I had worked myself up from a production assistant, to a location scout, location manager, video editor, and an occasional production manager. I was working in an office with four producers, a husband and wife team who focused only on European commercials, and two film producers, one who to this day is quite successful.
I was at a place in my life where I thought everything was heading in the right direction, my father and brother were having some serious financial troubles and they moved in with me. This was probably one of the most prolific times for me in terms of writing. If you saw me, then you saw me with pen and paper in hand, or 3 x 5 cards jotting down notes or ideas. I was working on pitching ideas for screenplays and actually came quite close to landing a deal.
During this time my younger brother was going through some serious emotional issues and my life was now consumed in chaos, and looking back on it now this really set the tone for everything else. We began to attract nothing but chaos, anything and everything that could go wrong seemed to go wrong.
It all culminated in two events where one week my father was driving my car and it was totaled in a wreck, and just seven days later to the day I was driving a motor home full of models from our shooting location back to a hotel where our production offices were set up, when I ended up on the end of a three car pile up where seven people went to the hospital.
Neither my father or I have ever been driving during a car accident, and in one week we both totaled two vehicles, interesting how that just seemed to have happened.
I phoned my father that afternoon and I asked him point blank. “Where would you guys be happy?” Their response was “Back in Colorado.” So I gave up my dreams of a Hollywood career, and moved us all to Colorado Springs. I was actually closer to achieving my dream than I had ever been, in fact my producer friend was in the process of hiring a writer for an idea I pitched him.
Thus began an almost twenty year career of me helping someone else to try and find their happiness. I moved from helping out my father and brother, to taking care of my mother. Then onto my sister and my two nieces, then even for a bit my grandmother, then back to my sister and two nieces.
I don’t regret helping out my family, nor do I hold it against them. The point in all of this as I was explaining to Jim tonight, is that “helping” them all this time was in fact just a crutch to avoid taking responsibility for creating my own unhappiness in life. They became my excuse for why I failed in Hollywood, for why I failed to achieve my potential, when all it boils down to was I used them to avoid even trying to accomplish those dreams. Why? That four letter word I used in a very recent post. F-E-A-R.
I have been thinking about this all night and it really hit hard as I drove home without the radio on. I do some of my best philosophizing when the radio is off in the car. What I had come to realize was that if I had instead went out and created my own happiness , chased my dreams, reached my potential I very well could have been much more successful than I am today, which would in turn help me create an abundant life, then I would have been more capable of sharing that abundance without having to give up my own happiness.
I have seen this in action. Two of my greatest friends live highly abundant lives, and because of this they share their abundance with others, and this trickles down I don’t know how far, and it all began with just one of those two friends in the beginning sharing her abundance with the other.
