In the pursuit of true success

First of all, we have to define what true success is. This tends to be a very debatable issue for people, but within this entry I will give a definition that has brought me joy, peace of mind and enhanced my health during the course of my path towards achieving said true success. Oh, but *you* don’t have that success yet, you might be thinking right now. True and untrue at the same time. I’ll explain why.

For me, my success has to do with how much I am being read all over the world, how much my name has become known as an author; with how much I’m growing and expanding as an actress and performer; with how much I get booked week by week as a model; also, with having financial and political freedom to travel and research subjects for both my fiction writing and my healing techniques; additionally, to be in good physical, emotional and spiritual health; and finally, but just as important as the others, being in a healthy, balanced and nurturing relationship with a worthy partner. So, I give you this very personal example of myself to make my point with the one example that I know for sure I can speak freely of without hurting any susceptibilities. In order to make this entry organized and easy to follow I will start with my definition, then give you a bit of my backstory, and finally declare why I know I am in the right path to true success based on my four pillars and giving examples of my level of success in each.

True success: “Being happy and content with what you’re doing and with the results of your labour”; this includes being healthy and balanced in every level: physical, emotional, spiritual and intellectual, so as to enhance the positive outcomes of the hard work and the feeling of achievement and satisfaction that is being reached by it. The four levels will vary according to every individual’s needs and goals: we cannot expect the same level of knowledge in every area within every person’s brains, or that everyone’s cannon of physical health and beauty will be accepted by everybody else; and certainly not that everyone’s spiritual beliefs will rank the same to have a universal measurable level. The only one of these factors that should be the same for all should be the emotional health one, but because this is a complicated subject, I will dedicate the next entry to it. I shall dedicate entries to the other levels as well, worry not. The balance and health in these four pillars will determine the happiness derived from the pursuit and achievement of the longed success, so they are ALL important.

Why is such a simple definition so important as to dedicate a full entry to it? Here is where I insert a segment of my personal search and healing. I was born with a brain lesion so tiny that it wasn’t detected until I was 23; this might have been because I had not checked myself in years, but the fact is that the lesion was so tiny that it could only be detected when the technology was advanced enough to look that close into the brain and find it. That lesion, however tiny it was, was responsible for malfunctions in my brain biochemistry, thus giving me depression and a disorder that made me even more hypersensitive than I already was. For a young Mexican, growing up in a smallish city during the 80s and 90s, words like “depression” and “schizoaffective disorder” were sociability killers. I was naturally an introvert, as artists tend to be; but, I also wanted to be understood, and I wanted more than anything to feel like I belonged, that I was cherished, that I was normal. It wasn’t until later that I realised just how lucky I was not to be normal, because it was my peculiarities and quirkiness that have undoubtedly put me on the path of true success. But tell that to a depressive teenager whom everybody thinks is just a spoilt child, and you might not get the same answer. The reason I can talk so surely about this, is because I mapped out my healing and my life in such a way that I was sure to succeed, even though a lot of that work went unnoticed by my consciousness, which doesn’t necessarily mean that everybody should just sit back and let their insides do the job, but that we are wise and we know what tends to be the best for us and how to get to that, so we should trust ourselves and let our bodies, emotions and spirits do the talking every now and then.

What I did was go both for the standard and the alternative cures. As I joined workshops in healing and energy and the arts (because those also have incredible healing properties), I also took medication and kept up with my big or small accomplishments. It took me twenty-six years to get to the point that I am now (because I started long before the lesion was detected; I started when I was 14, and the detection of the lesion only opened a new set of methods to enhance the healing process I had going for me). Now, before you say: “26 years is too much, I cannot wait that long”, let me say that one of the best ways to ensure true success, is to accept the path and learn to enjoy it, as well as being grateful for every step, good or bad, in which we can either learn and grow, and enjoy and enhance our ways. This might be a repeat message, but I am a big believer in repeating those messages that are worth repeating if they will enhance and accelerate the reader or listener’s process.

(As a side note, this does not include abuse. We don’t ever have to be grateful for abuse, nor are we responsible for it, in any level – and it’s only natural to feel angry at having experienced and to want justice to be served. This is a subject which merits an entry on its own though.)

Because of all of those workshops and years of effective treatments, I can safely say that my emotional and spiritual health are in great conditions, with my physical health currently failing due to the current pandemic (and due to the two miscarriages I have also openly talked about before), and my motivations to pursue everything else on the list a complete success. The tools I used to create this satisfactory state are mostly positive thinking and gratefulness. I found out that the more I enjoyed my path towards my goal and the more I let the world know how thankful I was for all the blessings and opportunities I had coming my way, the more little things I achieved. What was even more, I found out that those little things were summing up to become bigger things, and those themselves are on their own path to become central in my particular goals in literature, so I find even more reasons to keep smiling and to keep saying thanks. (Small note of warning: positive thinking is NOT meant to be used instead of treatment, but alongside it, and it does NOT mean being blind to your own dark side or to your specific disorder, because then you might end up repressing your issues instead of healing them. Use it wisely!).

In terms of my continuous desire to have a healthy and fulfilling relationship, I have talked extensively about that on previous entries, which I invite you all to read if you so wish, and can declare that I have no reserve or shame in talking openly about my previous romantic downfalls and successful outcome. For now, I will only say that after being single for over six years, and admittedly refusing physical contact for the greater part of the last year of those, I was called crazy many times for keeping loyal to a list of 43 qualities I needed to find in a man in order to actually dive into a relationship with him. Given that those qualities tended to be more about his being emotionally, intellectually and tastefully compatible with me, I was not backing down, and I am very glad I did: I am happily married to the man of my dreams and we are working together to achieve our artistic goals, and I do feel like the luckiest woman in the world. Granted, some of those points were among the lines of: “that he likes fantasy, sci-fi and all things nerdy”, so some of the books and movies that are important to me in those genres are not so much to my wonderful husband and vice versa, but I think we can all agree that that’s where compromise takes place in order to make it a successful relationship. Compromise comes in many ways for many people, because what we all consider important differs so vastly between us all, that it would be difficult to give just one example to satisfy everyone. Maybe I will write an entry solely for the purpose of spreading the secret to successful relationships, so watch this space.

I feel like I’ve made my point so far, and will only add that in terms of the other areas of success, the reason I’m in a happy place to speak about them is that I keep seeing open doors and opportunities, so I keep taking chances and enjoying the effects of getting good results here and there or learning what to do and what not to do for the next chance I take.

In terms of my own definition, Being happy and content with what you’re doing and with the results of your labour, what I am doing right now is steadily walking towards the ultimate goals in my life, and because the results of what I’m undergoing have been good, as well as the path being so enjoyable, I can surely say that I am happy and content while doing that I’m doing. The current state of the world and what it has meant for freelance artists in the UK to survive the pandemic under a shambolic government has indeed made it much harder to get to where I want to be in my career, I won’t lie! Things have slowed down enough that I’ve had to make changes to my plan of action, and being ill for over two months due to a chest infection hitting me hard shortly after having had covid has not been an easy ride; additionally, my Instagram portfolio being hacked and watching my carefully crafted portfolio of 5 years disappear in an instant was deflating to say the least. But then again, I wouldn’t be myself if I didn’t get up, dusted myself and kept going!

So, you don’t always have to have reached your ultimate goal to consider yourself successful, although it is important that you carry on pursuing it, otherwise you might fall into conformity rather than contentment.

Thank you for reading, and I hope you are finding out that you have what it takes to call yourself truly successful,

Sandra Cole ≈ Writer, healer, dreamer, lover