Fear, Exposed – Featuring Claudia Peralta
Happy Tuesday, guys! I’ll keep today’s Fear, Exposed intro short – this wonderful, fabulous, (gorgeous!), India-loving extraordinaire is Claudia. Nomad at heart (and in practice!), & brand-new resident of Nashville, Tennessee. Chocolate cake lover, yoga practicioner, and avid student of the school of life. Recently launched the blog Creative Relationship with her partner, Matt, in order to share what they’ve learned & help others who are interested in living and loving consciously.
Living & loving consciously – that has sex appeal, does it not?
Sometimes the fear is in change and in letting go.
I’ve always thought of myself as someone who embraces change. Someone who bravely deals with the rapid blind turns that life can throw at you. I’ve had the good fortune of getting to know change intimately. Change has been at times a friendly companion and at others a frightening specter, but it’s always been there as far back as I can remember.
My first eleven years were spent moving around the world. We moved camp every year or two; getting to know a new place as “the new girl” was a way of life. My father worked on government road projects, so when the road was finished, our trip down the next road began.
My family settled into a new country, new school, new friends, even new languages more often than anyone else I knew. All these moves helped me to face many fears. I was a shy child, so the frequent moves taught me to confront my shyness and to feel comfortable with altering circumstances.
By my mid twenties, I had lived in six different countries and in a multitude of cities. Not only was I at ease with change, but by now I believed it was a necessity in my life. I needed it like I needed water.
Traveling was indispensable, movement was my breath of fresh air, and challenging my fears and pushing past them was my way of feeling really alive.
The biggest fear I had to contend with was my fear of living a mediocre life, of the white picket fence and of a life of complacency–that fear was terrifying, and I did everything in my power to run from everything that smelled of conformity or following rules. Many times, people asked me, “What are you trying to prove, and to whom?” Looking back, I guess I was trying to prove to myself that I could beat my fears, that I could live in the way that I wanted to live, no matter what.
At the age of 26 I had just arrived in the south of Spain with my then-partner. We had been backpacking all of South America for a year and needed to start making some cash. We had a lot of enthusiasm and pages and pages of business ideas and ‘inventions’ that we had thought up over the course of our travels. Lifestyle was the main focus.
We wanted to continue to be able to travel and to lead the life of adventure with which we were both now familiar.
I loved traveling, I loved beautiful things, I loved India. The Far East was by far my favorite region of the world to wander around in (and still is), and India in particular holds a very very special place in my heart. In fact, I’ve always called it “the home of my heart,” a place that my heart fell in love with from the moment I first landed there. For anyone that has ever traveled there, you will probably smile knowingly when I say that India is a place that you either love or hate. There are no “maybe’s” in India. It is a full-on experience! A country of color and contradiction, of immense wealth and poverty, of deep traditions and many Gods.
We started a company importing everything Indian: architectural pieces, jewelry, textiles, furniture…everything that was beautiful and everything that was attractive to my eye. I backpacked the backroads of my beloved India, (and other eastern countries) for the next 10 years looking for things for our business.
My love affair with India grew and flowered. At the same time, our business grew and flowered.
It became bigger than we ever though it would (or ever planned on for that matter). It in fact became the proverbial “golden cage” in my life. The business was prosperous and well known, but it also required an immense amount of time and attention in order to maintain. As much as I loved it, in many ways I was also tied down by it. But at that time, I didn’t care. We were doing so well, and I was doing something I loved.
In addition, my business was a great teacher for me.
It taught me to keep facing the new fears that came up.
It taught me that you don’t have to have a degree or schooling in something in order to succeed; all you need is passion and the willingness to work hard and go the extra mile.
Belief in yourself and belief in your path.
It taught me that you can dream something and make it come true. It taught me to do business as a woman traveling alone in countries where women just don’t do that–business OR traveling alone. It helped me hone my instincts and feel confident in my ability to create.
I matured so much through this experience and grew into a successful business woman. I gave as much love and care to my business as I would have to any child I might have had. I gave it my full energy, anxious nights and grinding days.
Until one day I realized I had become enslaved.
My profession had become my identity, my ‘free’ life was just an illusion, because I was bound hand and foot to the commitment of my work. My life was dedicated to my business and I was forgetting to live. I was forgetting my fear of conformity because I was giving in to it. I was losing myself.
In the meantime my life had brought one of its twists and turns…my partner and I had broken up and we decided that only one of us would continue to run the business.
I decided to let go.
The year of 2008 was my “dark night of the soul.” I struggled that entire year with the decision of letting go. Mostly the advice I got from people was that I should stay and run the business.
I heard:
“You would be stupid to throw away so many years of your life”
“Leave and do WHAT?”
“Why would you leave a perfectly good thing in order to follow exactly WHAT?”
“You would be out of your mind to give up the business!”
In fact, most of the opinions I got were of the negative kind, telling me to stay put, to keep doing what I was doing. Yet somehow, deep inside of me, I felt that I needed to let go, to do something new, to free myself of my beautiful golden cage, to find another expression of me.
Letting go was the hardest decision I’ve had to take in my life so far. I was completely terrified. Afraid of what would come next, afraid of making the biggest mistake of my life, afraid that everyone else was right and I was giving something up that I shouldn’t be giving up. Afraid of being no one without my business, afraid of how I would survive and what I would do next.
Yes, it took me an entire year to finally decide! I thought I was quick to make decisions, but this certainly took the cake for procrastinating. I had so much fear that I gave myself an ulcer and dove into a depression that lasted for months.
The change I thought I was so comfortable with, turned into a monster that I could not face. Letting go had become an insurmountable fear.
Change was once my friend, then it was my teacher, now it was my biggest fear.
Finally I made the leap, I let go of everything. That really meant everything: my business, my ex-partner, the country I had been living in for the past ten years, my friends, my stuff…and then I got on a plane with my dog and left it all behind.
On my way to who knows where.
It has been two years since my big leap into the unknown. Again change and fear have become my biggest teachers. Showing me my self-worth is not tied to my job, showing me I can survive the hardest of times, showing me I do have the courage to follow my heart and my instincts no matter what, no matter where, no matter what anyone says.
I’ve found myself again, found my freedom again, and found that the decision I made was the right decision. I want my life to be a collection of many precious moments and experiences, many expressions and many careers. I don’t want to be tied down to something just because I “should be,” just because it seems like the “smart thing to do” to other people. I want my life to be an interesting book of life, something I can look back on in my old age and feel proud of and smile to myself about.
I count myself as infinitely fortunate, and am so grateful for the experiences that life has brought about. Change and fear have taught me about myself and this world and how to navigate it in the most aware, awake, and loving manner.
I like what Amy Bowman said in a previous post here on the series Fear Exposed, it is funnily enough, something that my sister kept telling me when I was dealing with my own excruciatingly painful decision to let go.
“When a door gets closed, a window will open.”
…a window did open, and I was happily surprised at what was on the other side. If, like me, you are feeling afraid of letting go of something–of closing a door for fear of what is or isn’t on the other side–I too, urge you to to crawl through that window… and find magic there.
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Ash Note:
1) This post contains so much wisdom, it’s ridiculous. I so fell in love with Claudia upon first email–no question as to why.
2) I decided to up and come to Chile this past weekend. So, there’s that. I thought it was summer here, but I was cruelly deceived–it’s still cold. And my fingers are frozen. And I didn’t bring any sweatshirts. And all I really, really, really want is a sweatshirt. Though the cheap red wine has been doing a good job of keeping me warm. I think I’ll be here for a while – if you’re in the neighborhood, please let me know. As I said to those on my email list, I promise not to force you to eat any strange type of sausages. Though, the chopped onion, lima bean & lemon salad I ate last night was pretty damn good.
3) If you have been hibernating/kidnapped/hiding in a cave and didn’t hear about my latest project, You Don’t Need a Job, You Need Guts: Combining Passion + Self + Business Through Digital Entrepreneurship, click here to see how you can wake up randomly in Chile, too, whenever you want (and make a living while you’re at it).
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