My Heart is a Compass

Follow your heart, they say, but sometimes she leads you to the landfill. A plastic bag can float past in the wind and you’ll hear her say, “this is good enough.” The heart may also choose a love that is secret, impossible, utterly ridiculous, or a lie, just to see what happens. Because of these things, I viewed my heart as a total liability. She clearly needed adult supervision and under no circumstances could be responsible for making major life decisions. Then grief came to town and changed everything I knew about my heart.

Three weeks before I turned twenty five, the world as I knew it fell apart. I endured a painful breakup with my first big love, then a friend committed suicide and my beloved dog passed away in the same week. It was one of the most painful times in my life and yet, one I am immensely grateful for today.

Before my life turned into a sad country and western song, I was travelling on the wrong trajectory. I was pouring all of my energy into politics and criminal justice while harbouring a terrible secret: I wanted to write and make films.

I was no stranger to being an artist. I had graduated from a performing arts school as an actor, dancer and filmmaker, but I had turned away from my creativity at a pivotal point in my life because it lacked (in my opinion) credibility and substance. I wanted to be seen in the world of men as powerful, reliable and logical. I wanted to feel like I was making an important contribution. Stories aren’t going to change the world. This is what I told myself.

In truth, I was terrified of failure. I convinced myself there was a loophole to the vulnerability of being visible. What would people think of me if I followed my heart and fell flat on my face? Instead, I took the safe path, the one where my heart wasn’t in it and I started to live a life that wasn’t meant for me.

There are consequences for this choice and I felt them most intensely in my body. I began to suffer from strange flu-like ailments and I lost my voice regularly. I became exhausted to the point where no amount of sleep could restore my energy. I was restless, always unsatisfied, searching for the next big hit of fulfilment outside of myself. People I loved became obstacles to achievement, so I pushed them away. The sound of my inner calling became nothing more than a faint whisper. I kept marching forward until I nearly ran myself into the ground. Only grief could have corrected my path.

The pain of loss can clarify what’s truly important to us. It draws lines in the sand. It drops our masks and turns on the lights. The clarity I needed was this: either the world is going to break my heart, or I’ll do it myself. There’s no way forward without shedding a little salt water.

In these dark nights of my soul, I turned to storytellers for solace. I read endless poems from Rumi and discovered The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. Both writers are heavy-hitters for a heart-led life of devotion and purpose. Their words inspired me to pick up a pen and begin to write:

What if these little whispers of desire are not my secrets to bury, but my directives to follow? What if this is how purpose reveals itself? What if my heart is not a treacherous organ, but my compass, both the map and the treasure? Can I be willing to be shown who I really am?

This was the first tentative step on a journey back to myself. A broken heart saved me. The pain I was desperately trying to avoid ended up being the direction I needed to unleash my talent and voice.

This craft has led me to share my words through stories, screenplays and poems. I've discovered the thrill of watching actors bring my characters to life, been given opportunities to travel to far off places and meet incredible people, to walk the red carpet in Cannes, to cry my heart out on a beach, to escape an erupting volcano, to fall in love with a stranger, to save a child from the cliffs… I have so many stories to share and it all started with a paper and a pen, searching for a spark of light to find my way out of the dark.

It’s not the path of fools to follow our joy, to claim what lights us up or declare who we love to the entire world. It’s a matter of survival. A storyteller belongs to this world. In fact, my remarkable real self just might be my most important contribution.