Drive to Be Extraordinary – Reflections on Embracing Acceptance

Not in the obvious ways it once did, but in subtler currents that quietly shape the landscape of my days.

For much of my life, I embodied the familiar pattern of codependency – anxiously attached, endlessly accommodating, always trying to earn love through usefulness. Like many people, these patterns grew from trauma, but that is not the point of this essay.

I have spent years recognizing these habits and loosening my dependence on approval. Yet as one of the layers falls away, another reveals itself. What I notice now is not so much the desire to please others as the quiet pressure to become someone worthy of admiration – to live a life that appears successful, meaningful, extraordinary.

I feel it in my body before I recognize it in my thoughts.

I notice a tightening in my chest and a tensing of my forehead and jaw. I sense a subtle urgency that shallows my breath. My attention keeps rushing toward an imagined future instead of resting in the life unfolding before me. I struggle through the day, feeling both frenetic and dispassionate at the same time.

It is astonishing how much life energy can be consumed by trying to become someone other than who we already are.

One place this reveals itself is through my love of dance.

I spend countless hours each week learning, practicing, rehearsing, editing music, creating costumes, and caring for the body that allows me to dance. When I move, I experience a kind of remembering. I belong to my body again. To the earth beneath my feet. To ancient lineages of women who expressed wisdom through movement. To artistic community. To the mysterious eros of existence that longs to express itself through every living thing.

Sometimes, while dancing, I can almost feel beauty moving through the room, awakening something tender in those watching. I cannot explain it, but it feels deeply important.

Yet another voice accompanies me. It whispers that dance is not productive, it earns no money and it offers no essential service. It convinces me that at my age I will never become extraordinary.

It reminds me that every hour spent dancing could have been invested in consulting, teaching, caregiving – roles I know how to do well. It invents stories that I am disappointing people, despite no one ever saying so. Even while dancing, I can sometimes feel myself dancing toward an imagined version of success instead of simply inhabiting the dance itself.

Lately this same pattern has appeared in another place.

For months I have wanted to begin writing a newsletter – not so much as a marketing strategy, but rather as a series of letters from this place Between Worlds. A place where poetry, reflection, and ordinary life might meet one another with tenderness.

The idea feels simple. However, every time I return to it, I find myself asking different questions:

Will anyone read it? How do I make it stand out? Should I build courses? Should this become a business model? Should I be teaching something?

My mind begins choreographing the future in a linear progression based on what has worked in the past or what seems to work for other people. It sketches programs and organizes offerings. It imagines audiences and measures outcomes. Everything appears coherent on paper. Yet every time I try to step into those plans to start creating, something inside me grows quiet.

It isn’t fear – it feels more like sorrow and grief.

Sorrow for a strangely different creative impulse that wants to emerge from within me but has no space or permission to wonder, experiment, play and be messily imperfect.

Grief for an identity that has carried me faithfully for decades – the teacher, the consultant and the helper. The woman who knew how to create value by doing more.

These identities are not wrong. They simply may not know how to accompany me where my soul is now leading. My mind still believes fulfillment lives somewhere ahead – in becoming more successful, more influential, more extraordinary.

But beneath that aspiration hides something far less noble. The longing to be special. To matter more. To be admired. To finally feel enough. From that place arise comparison, judgment, perfectionism, and subtle separation from others, as reflected in this poem.

Drive to Be Extraordinary

Intruding sly pervasive dark thoughts
Goading unending quests for greatness
Prodding open wounds through comparison

Triggering fear when deemed subordinate
Commanding ruthless focus on proving value
Rejecting messy imperfect creative expression

Eliciting lofty hubris when deemed superior
Seeking endless proof to hold up the walls
Morphing creative gifts into devices of show

Protecting by judging others as ordinary
Unwilling to appreciate their magnificence
Distancing from deep vulnerable connections

Finding fault in the accolades of others
Raging with righteous jealousy and resentment
Resisting receiving their loving gifts of creation

Denying acceptance of the present experience
Projecting continuously into an imagined future
Wishing painfully for a life other than what is

-Tejal Tarro

For weeks I have lingered with the final stanza. I painfully recognize myself in it. How often I leave the present in search of a future that promises certainty and fulfillment. How quickly I begin choreographing a life instead of dancing with the one already here.

The strange thing is that when I stop asking what I should become and instead ask what my heart truly longs for, the answer is surprisingly simple.

Not success. Not certainty. Not even clarity.

And beneath even that, something quieter still. My soul longs to invite people into the spaces between worlds, where together we might become still enough to hear the subtle mysterious calling of divine love.

I no longer know exactly what form that invitation will take.

I still feel drawn to write letters and collaborate on retreats, but perhaps the invitation may open to wild adventures not yet imagined.

For now, I am learning not to choreograph the future, but to listen more deeply to the music already playing – to love its changing timbre and tempo, its wild crescendos and spacious rests, trusting that together they are composing the symphony of my life.

Instead, I return to the poem.

This time, its ending feels different. In fact, it feels more like a threshold to new possibilities.