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Excerpts From The DataCast
C: I want to apologize in advance for what is about to happen. So welcome. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome to episode three. Are we on three now?
K: We are on three,
C: Three of the DataCast with the Neurodivergent Data Witches. And I am, I will hex you. I am. Don't come for me. I am try Jesus. Not me. One of the neurodivergent I apologized. I apologized.
K: So I guess I need to say I'm the fuck around and find out Neurodivergent Data Witch. I guess I come off. Like you wouldn't find out, but you will find out.
C: I remember in 2002 when this book came out by Rick Warren, you might've heard of it called the Purpose Driven Life. And that was the first time that I really heard about this thing called a purpose. And each and every one of us has a purpose. Now he breaks down 5 purposes. And the first four it has to do with your relationship with God and purpose. Number five is the one where everybody kind of gets stuck and gets hung up on. And it was, you were made for a mission you're made for a mission, which means what you were do. One thing you were made for a singular purpose. Now this book was amazing, right? It sold over how many comments, 50 million copies over 85 different languages by 2020, this is again a Christian book.
C: And because it was so popular and Mr. Warren was making all of this money, it went from just being something that Christians do to something that everybody should know that you are a here for particular purpose. And it's important that you stay on this path, so you don't miss it. And so everybody was like scrambling around, like, how do I know my purpose? And as a spiritualist, another one of my questions that I get all the time is in my own, the right path, you know, what do I have to do to reach my purpose? And I always look at people like they crazy. I'm like, what are you talking about? Whatever you're doing right now, you're doing in your purpose or you wouldn't be doing it.
C: And so with the me being neurodivergent as many neurodivergent individuals, I have lots of interests. There are many things that I would like to do and lock to try it. I have a history of jumping from subject to subject, from topic to topic from going over here, to going over there. And if you look at my resume, I'm all over the place. And so it made me feel uncomfortable with being who I am, because what if I missed my purpose, stay with one thing long enough in order for me to see if this is the one thing that I'm supposed to be doing. And so a lot of shame, a lot of guilt and just operating in the way that I want to operate somewhat brings us back to time. So I spent a lot of time wasted, wasted, feeling bad for who I am because of this manufactured thing called a purpose.
K: That is interesting. That is interesting. Hm. I can relate to you in a slightly different way. So I was always concerned that there was a purpose connected to something I had not explored yet. So I felt behind and I felt, because again, I'm, I'm neurodivergent. I'm a person with a lot of interests in a lot of abilities. And so I felt like I was behind and there was some knowledge out there that I should put this and I would never have, like, I was always afraid I'm going to die too early and I wouldn't have time to get to it. And it, and it is connected to exactly to what you're saying, his whole idea about a single purpose. And this one is, and this is one of the things I'm glad you brought the thing up about like, you're on the path.
C: I feel more connected to my roots as a black woman who is an entrepreneur. Who's a creator, who's a maker because I've had to bigger out because I had to make a way out of no way. And I know for a fact that my grandmother and my great-grandmother also had to find a way, had to make a way out of no way, had to figure out how they were going to do things and sometimes on a day to day basis.
C: And I'm sorry if I'm stepping on someone's toes and I'm sorry if I may offend someone, but I think we may have gotten a little lazy and I don't even like using the word lazy. But we may have gotten a little bit lazy because we didn't have to figure out how to do things. If we just did what we were told in corporate America, we can get a paycheck and we didn't have to worry about anything else. And so, because we were just getting a paycheck, we were not out here being disruptors. We were not out here creating pathways for our own children, for our own communities, for society. We were just doing what we were told.
K: Let me try this on for night, shift it. There we go. We were doing some different work because obeying does not align with who we are. And I can say for me personally, I tried to convince myself that I was okay, just obeyed. But it actually was a different kind of work that I had to do. There is a, your point is well taken. Cause I do unstructured. It's like, there's a point in your life where you resign. You're like, when you're about 40 ish, you really, somebody said this to me. And I, I believe that personally, when you, like you're 40, you have to make a decision about whether you're going to live or die. And I think connected to what you're saying is some people decide that they're going to die and not necessarily a physical death.
K: For me personally, it felt like crashing. Even if you looked at me on the outside, it seemed like I was adjusted. I was checking all the right boxes. But it it was, it just, it just wasn't right. And so it was interesting, like what you're saying about grandmothers and all that. It's interesting that they know all these different ways. We know all these different ways yet. We subscribed to organizations. No, no, this is what I want to say. Organizations hire. And they benefit from all these different ways of knowing. Then they punish us for all the ways of knowing.
C: Yeah. They want someone who's innovative. They want someone who can do, who thinks out of the box. They want someone who's on the forefront of technology. They want all these things. No. They Don't. No, they don't. They don't want any of that.
K: And so you know, just having that perspective, the respect for time, the respect for your time and not getting caught up in this should be done or should be this purpose, or this should be happening on our time
C: Honor. What does, so my question is what does, what would honoring time look like for you? What could it look like for you? And I'm not necessarily saying this to Kimberly, but for whoever is listening to this data cast, what would it look like? If you truly honored time? Something tells me it looked different than what you're doing right now.
K: Yeah, I would think so. Yeah. And, and I mean, and, and I know this question, I, for me, it would be deciding, deciding the value, the meaning, just deciding where I want to spend my time and immersing myself in the things that I really want to do that will honor my time. The deciding is, is a conscious act. This is where I want to be. This is what I choose to do. This is how I want to do it. And I take whatever comes with that and then allowing myself to be in that. Right?
C: Yes. And however long you're going to be at that moment. And when you're done feeling good about being done and moving on to whatever is next, right? I so not deciding is still deciding
K: It is absolutely. It is.
C: To me, not deciding is deciding on a certain depth. It is a decision. It is a decision.
K: It absolutely, it makes me think about our conversation last week, about time being a construct. So in every moment you are deciding what that construct means. So even though we have clocks, we have watches. It's not a foregone conclusion. What time is. So you're constantly redefining it as you work through this thing called life, your art.