On Tuesday, in a Human Design class, I listened to someone else’s chart get explained, and a pattern of mine finally made sense. I’ll spend ten days deciding whether to buy a $20 lymphatic drainage brush, but I was a hundred percent sure about a $500 business membership before the call that pitched it was over.
A gut yes, or ten days of arguing.
Human Design is a big system, and I’m not going to try to explain all of it here. The short version is that my chart says I’m a Generator, and that my decisions come from what Human Design calls Sacral authority. In plain words, that’s a gut yes or no, in the moment, with no reasoning attached.
The membership got a yes. The brush never got a yes or a no, so my head took over and argued about it for ten days. I’d read those words on my own chart and nodded along, and it took hearing them applied to somebody else for them to click.
Why I left, and why I can’t stop.
When I first saw Satisfaction and Frustration on my chart, I thought, well, duh, isn’t that everybody’s? It isn’t. They’re the two signals for my type: satisfaction when my energy is going where it should, and frustration when it isn’t.
I find the satisfaction in building, solving problems, writing code, and talking to people about what they don’t know technology can do for them. Those fill my cup, and I left my job to do them in quantities I control. My chart didn’t make that decision for me, since I’d already made it. It put into words why leaving became a path I had to consider, and it explains why I keep working: I’m energized by the work, and I keep choosing the path that keeps my energy high.
That’s also the trouble. The guest speaker in that class, Jenna Marie of SoulFull Business, said it plainly: “Generators get confused because they think that they’ve got this endless energetic battery.”
A year ago, a weekend could go like this. I’d get up, make coffee, feed the dogs, and come upstairs to work. My boyfriend would drag me out to lunch, and when we got home, I’d make more coffee and go back upstairs to work. Then a nap, more coffee, and back upstairs again. I was bothered when I had to stop for dinner. Now I can do that every day of the week, and that’s not great.
Slowly learning to stop.
That Tuesday morning, before my second cup of coffee, I was sitting at my desk trying to organize my thoughts and get the day started. It felt like someone tapped me on the shoulder and whispered, “Hey, you should probably go lie down for a little bit.” So I did, for half an hour. When I got up, I realized I’d been working nonstop since I left my job, almost four weeks.
Lying down when I need to is one benefit of working for myself that I didn’t plan on. I don’t lose a whole sick day, and I’m more productive the rest of the day instead of slogging through it to impress somebody or rescheduling a meeting.
I didn’t expect the nonstop working to change right away, and it hasn’t all changed. This past weekend, though, I noticed that I didn’t want to spend the whole day at my desk, and I let myself not do it.
I think the whisper on Tuesday morning came from the same gut that said yes to the membership. I’m used to hearing it tell me to go. I’m still learning that it tells me when to stop, too, and that listening to it then counts as much as listening when it says yes.
