Nurture Your Calling

In high school I became very attached to Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. It was the one book I brought with me on a month-long trip to Peru, where the pages became worn and well-loved. Until recently, I had forgotten its story and message.

I’m re-reading it now with my students and am remembering why the story spoke to me: It’s an incredible reminder to stay on our path and realize our Personal Legend – the purpose that calls to our heart. 

On this journey, our own calling is what we have to nurture first. 

For me, there have been a handful of experiences in my life which have stirred my soul, ignited my interest, and taught me the importance of nurturing the self.

I discovered my calling when I was six. My mom would come into my room in the middle of the night to nurse my baby brother. I got a front row seat to witness the best nurturer I know. 

That experience showed me that I am meant to carry life within me and be a mother.

Growing up, I looked for things to mother and nurture, from injured animals to injured friends – often forgetting that I myself was still a child that needed nurturing.

As we grow out of childhood, our mother’s love never leaves us. But there is a point in our adolescence where, in order to effectively nurture others, we have to learn how to love ourselves first. 

I think one of the mistakes many young women make is that, instead of finding the well of love within, we try to look for it in someone else. 

That’s what I did. But the story of young love is messy, and I began to lose myself along the way.

It took four years to find healing after that four-year relationship. And we found it through words.

Language was something I learned to sculpt through my experience minoring in creative writing. Spring semester of my last year in college I was struggling with writing an assigned poem. I can’t remember the exact assignment, but I knew that the poem I was working on held the purpose of healing and a better understanding of love. 

Within a few days of finishing the first draft of my poem I received a message from my high school boyfriend, and we began to talk. Our conversations consisted of apologies, forgiveness, acceptance, and well-wishes. 

Since then, our lives have been a beautiful parallel of one another as we have found spouses and started our own families.

Writing poetry paved the way toward understanding who I am and what I need. After finding healing from writing just one poem, I made the decision to make it a daily practice the summer after graduation. 

I was still making mistakes and fumbling my way through the early stages of adulthood, but I had found and developed a medium through which I could process and document my discoveries.

In the height of the pandemic, my soul was at war with itself. I was in the last class of my graduate degree, and yet my purpose in life seemed blank and I felt unable to talk through what I needed. 

My husband Micah knew writing was my preferred method of working through life’s lessons when we got married. To help me out of my mental rut, he wrote questions on a notepad and I had to write my answer. 

Through the exercise of writing, I rediscovered my calling of motherhood.

Starting our family during a time where the world seemed at a stand still was definitely frightening, but my heart and the forces that inspire one’s purpose were not to be ignored.     

That’s not to say it was easy. Month after month of waking up in tears to another menstrual cycle made me frustrated, discouraged, and afraid. Had I misinterpreted my calling? Was I going to be blessed with the experience of carrying my own child?

In the end, God’s timing is always perfect.

My pregnancy with Emmett was tough, but rewarding. By the third trimester, I had regained much of my strength and took the opportunity to gather the poetry I had written over the years with the goal of publishing my work.

There were a number of foundational steps in the process of creating my poetry book.

One of the most meaningful steps was when my mom and I would go out for coffee where she would read the thematic stacks of poems I had put together. 

I think two things happened here: First, my mom found a way to continue to nurture the best parts of her daughter. And second, I was able to see if the pattern of my heart would sync with the pattern of another’s.

I had my first draft ready to be reviewed by friends when Emmett arrived. And almost exactly a year later, I approved my book for publication. 

I’ve come to find that the baseline of nurturing yourself comes from the pursuit of your Personal Legend. This looks different for everyone, but for me, I’ve discovered two things: First, I’m so much more at home in my own skin after the birth of my son; and second, my words have the power to not only help me find healing, but they allow others to find healing as well.

This is the pinnacle of nurturing: to nurture the self is to better nurture the world.