#18: Purpose isn’t the destination.
Frustration and the feeling of being alive.
We made it to 100 subscribers!!! Leona and I are absolutely blown away. All I can say is “Thank you,” though it doesn’t feel like enough… Thanks to you, The Luminist is a living, breathing thing! Not just pixels covered in cobwebs in a weird corner of the internet.
I want to give a very special shout-out to:
Kerri Aab of
Jeanette Brown of
andSandra Ann Miller of
Single-handedly, the three of you pushed The Luminist into the hundreds. Leona and I could not be more grateful. Everyone else, go check them out!
On to the post…
“THIS IS SO FREAKING HARD,”
I declare mournfully and melodramatically to my editor Leona in a Sunday-night video message. “I mean, we can do hard things, and it is so worth it, and I have no intention of stopping, but damn!”
I’m talking about The Luminist. My baby, my purpose, my everything. I love my little TL (my nickname for it)... but right now I want to throttle it.
Writing The Luminist is not hard in the way you may think. Yes, I bring myself to tears regularly while writing about my late husband. And sometimes I dig in so deep it takes me all weekend to recover. But the yearning and longing for Mike would be in my life whether or not The Luminist was. That’s not the hard part.
What’s hard is being utterly devoted and obsessed with a grand, planet-spanning mission (vibrant living for everyone) with only a snow-globe-sized clue on how to deliver on said mission. I don’t know what I’m doing or where I’m going! But at the same time, I absolutely cannot stop.
Mike’s death brought me life… So much life I almost don’t know what to do with it.
And while I’m wrestling with trying to turn this geyser of passion and purpose into something accessible, relatable, and hopefully less than 1,000 words (a girl can dream), I want to shout-out the people on Substack I see doing the exact same thing. Because it makes me feel so much better to know I’m not alone!
I came to Substack looking for a simple way to let strangers read my crazy ideas… and found a group of people who believe that words have the power to change lives — and are dedicated to figuring out how.
This post is for you. And for anyone who isn't satisfied with the status quo, but wants to innovate and create and provide meaning and spark transformation. For the ripple-makers, big and small. For the ones who can’t give up, sit down, shut up, or slow down because the fire within just won’t let them.
I decided to write The Luminist in July 2022. July 10th to be exact, the last day of the Do Lectures, an idea festival in Wales.
I had spent the weekend in this idyllic setting feeling like I had “found my people.” People that were interested in innovation of all sorts, even my bright (dark?) idea that by changing the way we think about death we can better our lives.
I was packing up my stuff alongside my glamping tent-mate Harriet, chatting about our highlights from the festival, when she included my idea as one she wanted to dive deeper into.
“I love your mission to change the conversation about death! I’ve been talking about it with so many people here, I think it could have a really big impact. Where can I learn more?”
Uhhhh. Nowhere. Just me, in this tent, talking to you.
I answered smoothly, “I’m working on starting a blog soon! Let me get your email and I’ll pass it along as soon as it’s published!”
On the train back to London, I sat next to my new friend Paul, the leader of an innovative design business. He offered creative assistance for my logo (along with boundless moral support!) Then hiking in Colorado six weeks later, I met a wide-smiled woman named Leona who wasn’t just open to talking about death but actually loved it — and had a background as a copy editor. In an email to Leona in late October, I shyly asked if she thought we could have everything ready to launch by November 15th. Her “yes” was resounding, confidence-boosting, and mobilizing. Two weeks later, on the six-year anniversary of Mike’s death, we launched The Luminist.
And it felt like my entire world fell into place…
Six years after everything was knocked out of place, things had finally found a home again, a rightness. But even better, a purpose. Thanks to TL, my life isn’t just for me and the kids anymore. It’s for everyone, for the whole world. My mission breathes me awake each morning. It strengthens my voice, no matter what topic is on my tongue. It nourishes me in a way I didn’t realize I was missing until I finally tasted it.
For more context — because I realize it’s an amorphous, glittery daydream of a feeling that is very hard to wrap your brain around — Jason Silva describes it like this:
I sent this quote to Leona a few weeks after TL’s launch.
“I can’t wait for you to find the thing that lights you up this way!” I beamed through my email to her.
It’s true. I want her, and everyone, to find the purpose that makes them feel like they’re glowing/floating/holding a puppy. But being handed a puppy isn’t the end of the road. It’s just the beginning. Because then you have to figure out what to do with all the energy of the thing wriggling in your arms! And quickly too, because it’s rapidly growing to 200 lbs.
Writing The Luminist, I have found myself on one of the steepest learning curves of my life.
I can write you a kick-ass business memo — laying out a process, quoting a Harvard Business Review article, extolling the virtues of trust-based leadership — in 15 minutes flat. I can absorb the REI sales associate in deep conversation about innate strength and human connection after loss for twenty minutes (true story)! I can get up in front of hundreds of people at a conference and share my lessons from leading my family through the toughest times with intention and humor… with barely two minutes of prep beforehand (true again)!
(Thank you for letting me brag a little. We all need to feel good at something sometimes!)
But this kind of writing… this is not my forte. Because we are not taking fully-baked, surface-level concepts and slapping them together.
My weekly process looks less like smoothly typing away on my glossy white iPad and more like this: bottled-up passion — along with so many sticky notes, scraps of paper, voice memos, ripped out newspaper articles, underlined and dog-eared book pages covering my desk and coffee table — spurs me to sit down and write. The stream of consciousness squirts out like silly string in a Nickelodeon skit, words covering the page with little rhyme or reason. That burst of energy then turns into the less-joyful slog of rewriting, deleting, rearranging, cmnd-z-ing, synonym-googling, meme-searching. And attempting not to sound like a textbook (Leona has had to give me that note, like, ten times).
But by Friday afternoon, no matter how humbling the writing process has been that week, Leona and I are both in pinch-myself-awe at what has channeled through us. Even when it’s not that good!
Because we are on our hero’s journey. We are stepping outside our comfort zones, outside the walls that keep us warm and safe and a little anesthetized. We are feeling the elements whip around us — and inside of us — cheeks red from the wind and the sun, lungs burning with the effort, backs sweaty from blood pumping. We can look back, down the mountain, and see how far we’ve come. We can see the spot where we once pointed up from and said, “Do you think we can get there? I think we should try.”
We’re not “there” yet. But it doesn’t matter. We are trying, and because of it, we feel alive.
There’s this myth out there that once you find “your purpose,” you’ll just be so locked in, so committed, so in-tune that the rest will just flow naturally. But that’s not how it’s worked for me. Deciding to pursue this massive mission has felt more like going to college: I’ve realized just how much I don’t know. From trying to figure out how to communicate literal paradoxes to teaching myself how LinkedIn marketing works to trying to find my balance on the fine line between underselling The Luminist and feeling like a sleazy salesman.
And what a gift it has been.
Struggling, week after week, to arrange the chaotic impulse inside me into a tangible, practical, death-exploring, life-transforming weekly newsletter returns me, week after week, to the raw preciousness of life.
At this point in the post, I’d usually like to drop in a quote (like the one with the puppy) that proves I’m not crazy. And that explains what I’m trying to say more succinctly. But I haven’t been able to find one for this section yet. Everything I see about struggle talks about strength and pushing through and leaving behind the old in favor of something new.
Which is all well and good. But there’s something more here.
Something about how struggle — worthy struggle, meaningful struggle, nothing-I’d-rather-do struggle — brings us back to life.
LIFE as in movement, change, seasons, transformation, death, rebirth, pushing out of the cocoon, learning to fly, winds that spread seeds far and wide, freezing in a frost but somehow blooming again.
LIFE as in unafraid to make a fool of yourself; willing to drop everything for the things and people and sunsets that matter; unwilling to stay quiet to keep others or yourself comfortable; screaming as you jump into the lake and then beaming as you dry off in the sun; ready to argue when it’s important and kiss and make up when it isn’t; in touch with your humility and your power, your impermanence and your legacy.
Discovering my purpose was cool and all, but more often than not, it feels like it’s discovering me.
Calling me into my next evolution, my next greatest level of being — fully, authentically, unapologetically… And scrapping everything that gets in the way of that.
Turns out purpose isn’t a one-way street. We create it. It creates us too. We use it to make the world a better place. It makes us better people.
Which was probably part of its purpose all along…
But our human brains love to think we’re the ones in charge ;).
In evolution,
Sue
P.S. Leona wants to add — even if it’s not your purpose, if you can get behind it, if you can step out of your comfort zone for it, if you can let yourself be moved by it (with healthy work-life boundaries always)… you’ll become more of you too.
Your turn!
When you think “purpose,” do you think, “that’s for other people, that’s too high falutin’, that’s not for me”?
Or are you in the trenches, forging your purpose with blood, sweat and tears?
Been there, my friends. Both places.
Share with us how it feels! What do you do during your moments of ugly-cry frustration? What are your little triumphs? What makes you feel more YOU?
Congratulations on reaching your first 100 subscribers. Lots of people struggle to find your purpose, so you are a step ahead. As you say in your article, you just need to know what to do with it...and find the right direction to move forward. Good luck on that journey and with your writing.
Thank you so much for the shout-out, Sue. It's nice to know my readers know a good thing when they see it! Thank you, too, for this beautiful thing, your TL. When I was 22, my Papa died. My grandfather was my world, my light, a rare source of unconditional love. I could never imagine my life without him. But, as he was dying, I decided to be strong for him, as he had for me, be present and put him first (as he always did for me). That experience was transformative, beautiful even. We talk about the wonder of birth, but being present for death is also something of a miracle. The difference, I think, is the perception of gain and loss (we can have a philosophical debate on that one all day...bring wine or, better yet, a fine Irish whiskey). I stand with you in your mission. We need to talk about death, lose our fear of it, learn a language for it, and not be angry at it (so hard). That will enrich our lives. Thank you for lighting the way on this path. xo