Your gift can feel like a curse: Working with your gift (part #2) [micro-essay]

If you don't yet know how to use it to its full potential, your gift can feel like a curse at first. | 100 DoW #69

Hey friends, this is micro-essay #2 (of ~7) in a miniseries on "Working with your gift.

If you click the button below, you can read the first in the series, “It's easy to be ignorant of your gift.”

Your gift can feel like a curse at first because you don't yet know how to use it to its full potential.

It is rare to follow your gift, especially between the ages of 10 and 30. Just the act of listening to your calling, even if it's vague at first, makes you deviant by nature.

The specific way in which you become deviant is the specific shadow that the light of your gift casts. That shadow can take the shape of many things, but here's a quick example of my life:

My gift is being curious, which manifests itself in asking questions. All. The. Time.

You could probably imagine what that was like in a school where asking the teachers questions was seen as disrespectful—going even further when asking questions that were out of the curriculum or that made the rest of the class feel uneasy. "You're too curious for your own good,” is what I was told.¹

It's not strange, then, to start resenting your gift, for it is the thing that makes you disconnected from others. But since the gift is part of who you are, if you suppress it, you forsake yourself, turning into a depressed and bitter person.

Truly feeling cursed.

It can take many years of having a difficult life—either answering your gift but feeling an outcast or ignoring it but feeling disconnected from yourself—if you don’t have mentors or examples to help and support you.

Only when learning to slowly work with your gift, realizing that there is an equal light side to the dark, can you see the impact you can have on your own life and that of others.

---

What is your gift (or calling or power)? And has it ever felt like a curse?

Thanks for reading!

Jibran

1

1. And I may well have been too curious for my own good. For the local maxima of good, perhaps. But I wouldn’t want to have lived my life without my exploratory nature and urge to understand.