This post was submitted on Tell a Story. Isn’t it time you told your story?

A few months ago I got serious about creative work. I pulled a book off my shelf that had been sitting there unread for 8 years: The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. I told my business partner that I was looking for other work that will be less time-consuming and will allow me to pursue creative work. I followed the guidance of a fortune cookie that led me to the right person to give me creative wisdom at exactly the right time in the right way. I wrote a spec script for a TV show because I have nothing to lose—and I am meeting people in the industry who can help me with it. I went to Burning Man. I met someone on the bus (the bus!) who led me to a screenwriting mentor. I am saying yes to the creative path by forcing myself to make a conscious decision—as often as possible—to get out of my own way.

I finally realized that I am the only one stopping me and I am the only one who has the power to change the course of my life and follow the path that is my “personal legend.” I started resenting movies and books that gave me the impression that if only I had chosen a different spouse or a different college or grown up in a different family, things would be better.The message that my whole life hinges on one decision is a lie. Sometimes you can change those things for the better and sometimes you need to just kiss them and thank them for making you who you are. I can start to live the life I want right now, in this instant, without doing any fixing of the past or replaying what could have been different.

The freedom I have is powerful when I remember what’s stopping me from living—really living—that unlived life I dream about. The one where I’m the person who gets to do what I want to do. Where I get paid to do something I love. Where I decide how I want to spend my time. Where I create things that I care about and want to share. Where I’m vulnerable and invite people to share my life and my struggles and in return, I feel less lonely and afraid that I’m the only one who feels the way I do.Where I feel less alienated and more human—alive. I have the chance to express myself and feel embraced and understood.

I was stopping myself from living the life I want to live and it’s a daily, hourly, moment by moment struggle to tell myself to get the hell out of my way. When I do, it’s worth it. And that makes it much easier to choose as time goes on.

Burning Man proved to be the best place to test my new self. There, it was easy to be the self I want to be all the time because I was around a community of people seeking their true selves too. It was so easy that I walked around the streets with a smile on my face and a garland of toilet paper rolls flowing from my cowboy hat. Even at Burning Man—a place where I was offered some lemonade from a man on stilts who invented a lemonade dispenser out of a body part—even at Burning Man—that was enough to get people to stop and take notice.

I loved it. The purpose I had in wearing my toilet paper head dress was to ask a simple question of people: “What’s stopping you?” I asked them to write it on a roll and promised it would be placed in the Temple of Flux to burn. I couldn’t do much for them but tell them I hoped it would be released. In that simple act, some of them told me it was. That was amazing.

As the mediator for these unwanted barriers, the experience was not only a symbolic shedding of the shadow of my own insecure, fearful self but a chance to offer that same hope to others. I loved that too. I also realized that a lot of my insecurities and hang-ups are shared by people who really look like they have it all together (which tends to be my assessment of most of the people I talk to—that they’ve got things together more than I do). But they are plagued by the same things that nag me—fear of success, fear of failure, self-loathing. I’m not alone.

As I walked around the block carrying these written and unspoken burdens on my head, the sun started to burn my shoulders and I also started to think about bearing the burden of everyone else’s barriers. When I thought about it, I realized that they weren’t my burdens to bear and that made me smile. I repeated it to myself over and over in my head: “these aren’t your burdens to bear”—and that made me cry.

I worry a lot, and too much about other people’s well-being. Until this point, I have literally made a career out of it. For me, it’s time to stop worrying about other people’s burdens, stop carrying them as my own, and release them along with my own. The ideal of selflessness has been one of my excuses to stop myself from living the life that I believe is waiting for me. Probably the most dangerous and selfish one.

When I dropped off the fears and barriers at the Temple, knowing they would be burned in a beautiful ritual, I serendipitously hung them across from a message that said “Let it all go.” In that moment, I did. I know that doesn’t mean that I won’t try to go back into my mind, gather up the pieces again and collect them in my arms—overflowing, holding on to my own fears and worrying about everyone else’s, indulging in self-pity once in awhile and always longer than I should.

What’s stopping you? Let it all go. And let it all go again when it creeps back in.