i was more "successful" before i was living my design 😬

LET ME BEGIN with a few tone-setting, clarifying statements:

this entire piece is a dramatization of sorts. in real experiential life, things are more spiralic and less black and white than what my articulations below account for. these sentiments are exploratory - diving into a particular facet of deconditioning to be immersed in its potency rather than observing the overall, zoomed out shape of the human design experiment.

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there is really no "before" living one's design. we are always living our design. there is a gradient of awareness in which we consciously observe the mechanics of our life and our design. that spectrum is what i'm speaking to here.

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on with the drama:

the more my own experiment takes a hold of my life, the less my life looks like i thought i wanted it to.

the more i tune into life from the seat of radical surrender, the less inclined i feel to spread human design far and wide or tout it as something that will improve your experience of this hallucination we call life. the affect of the human design knowledge - when fully digested in a differentiated and embodied way - is quite destructive. it destroys the life that your mind created for you, that you identify with, and that your mind works so hard to hold onto, and in the space where that attachment to fallacy was, an awareness of the life that you are designed for will grow.

i want to be respectful to the depth and nature of this transformation. it is radical. and it does not abide to the parameters of your programming.

so let me state some uncomfortable truths of it:

i had more “success” in my “career” before i was consciously living my design.

i had more financial “security” before i was consciously living my design.

i had a more robust social life before i was consciously living my design.

i had a stronger sense of certainty in my direction and purpose before i was consciously living my design.

i've lost a lot. i've grieved a lot. i've watched my values melt away and reform over and over again. the voids created by each of these deaths and ongoing detachments have made space for the incubation of something else - something immeasurable and infinite, something new but also ancient.

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i had more “success” in my “career” before i was living my design

my ideas of success and career were so coated in what conventional society had to say about these things that i could hardly feel into the version of success that is uniquely available to me when i stop thinking so hard about career and just watch where life takes me, my expression, and my impact.

what i have now is f r e e d o m

i trust my body and spirit to determine how and when and where and why i show up in the world, and how that is received and valued. i no longer try to fit my weird unique ungovernable complex expression of humanity into narrow templates shaped by homogenized society’s ideas of “career.”

i used to have a real sense of pride in my work ethic, my perfectionism, and my ability to affect change. now a days, i see more clearly the pain and the shame that was behind that “work ethic” and perfectionism and i acknowledge that the change that happens as a result of my expression is organic and not something i need to force. and to the dismay of my proud ego - it is also not something that i can take full or sole credit for.

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i had more financial “security” before i was living my design

my understanding of “security” was tied to those conventional measures of “success” and did not allow space for me to experiment with my own reality, my own preferences, and my actual needs.

what i have now is p r e s e n c e

i have never been without. regardless of what my mind has to say about lack, irresposibility, and insecurity in respect to money, in every single moment of my life, i have had everything i needed to be safe and secure. sometimes, its not enough according to what i think i need, think i want, think i should have, but it’s **always** enough to experience true safety, security, peace, and wellness in the present moment.

listen - living through this as-of-yet-immeasurable-moment of late-stage capitalism, at the cusp of an economical bubble that will eventually crash but who-knows-when, is still in many moments, scary and stressful for my mind.

the difference is that before living my design, i couldn’t really see through the fog. i accepted that fog of scarcity as my reality, because i didn’t know anything else other than what i was told i “should” have/do in relation to financial well being, and i made decisions that sacrificed my physical, emotional, and energetic well-being for the sake of a mental construct of financial responsibility that didn't actual provide me with any sense of security.

now, i have a sense of the constancy of the sun’s shining behind the clouds. the constancy is my actual well-being, and my growing trust in life’s unfolding. i still experience foggy days, but i’m able to watch the fog pass rather than be consumed by it. i don’t have to miss the joy and abundance that is available to me each and every day because i’m busy obsessing over the “what ifs” and the “shoulds” of money fears.

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i had a more robust social life before i was living my design

i was gauging the health of my relationships and my value to others through the etiquette and norms of polite, transactional society - which let’s face it, are being exposed in the collective psyche more and more these days as quite codependent.

what i have now is an anchor within myself and P E A C E

i am deeply attuned to relationship and community. there is soooo much in my design & astro that affirms this. AND. i am a fucking manifestor. my aura is CLOSED. i am a hermit. i am a heretic. i am single definition. i have 6 individual channels, 3 of which are in the integration circuit. if you don’t speak the language of HD - translate all of this as: kelsey is energetically and indisputably a loner, at the core.

we are all designed for connection (even me!), but in unique and unfixed ways which do not fit into any sort of measurable model of expectations and equity. many of us have not experienced as much true connection as we have experienced a false, forced version of such, and we dissatisfied and self-abandoning in our relationships.

there is an anchor in aloneness - a default separation, that is necessary to acknowledge and return to in order to maintain real, spontaneous, clear connection. without such an anchor, the version of connection we experience with one another is a calculated, dumbed down, diluted version - one that is perpetuated by a fear of aloneness that keeps us in a compulsive lack loop. i have written many times in the past few years about my delineation of the ~9 year chiron in aries transit that i like to phrase as “where have you been abandoning your self for fear of being abandoned by the other?” this is essence i am returning to in this reflection.

these days, my love for connection - for deep synergistic conversation, for collaborative mutation, for communal efforts - have taken a back seat. i sense that i am moving through a slow, thorough cleanse in which my learned behavior via relationship is getting a hard reset, and my true function within and capacity for connection is surfacing in ways that are both limiting and empowering.

self abandonment has become a non-option.

this is something more than “boundaries.” this is alchemy. this is calibrating to the specific, intentional, subjective lens and form that was designed for my incarnation, and letting my relationships follow. this is an experiment in radical surrender.

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i had a stronger sense of certainty in my direction and purpose before i was consciously living my design

a lot of what i THOUGHT i knew about me, my life direction, and my “purpose” was just NOISE. filler. distraction. a narrative that softened the sharpness of inhabiting the polarized reality of this plane. a coping mechanism that gave me a false sense of certainty under the guise of meaning.

what i have now is c r y s t a l c l a r i t y

clarity is not certainty, nor is it constant. but the clarity that i have, when it surfaces, is CRYSTAL clear. it is not something i can put into words. therefore it doesn’t translate very well to my professional bio, my website, or the copy i write to promote my work. but it is something i can feel in my body. and while it is cyclical and often fleeting, each it returns, it is fortified. each time i relax into uncertainty about “who i am” and “where i’m going,” and allow myself to experience and grieve the death of last year’s vision or of yesterday’s plan, i am graced with another pixel of the image of my sacred, unfolding life - an image that my mind could never create on its own.

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if you're down to weather the side effects, and ready for some upheaval, my next round of living your design starts this week (september 14, 2023)

learn more & register

to dip your toes and self-study with my courses, check out my human design intro offerings.

✌🏼