By Amber Weigand-Buckley
Editor
I learned the 5 W’s and an H before I learned almost anything else about myself.
Who, what, when, where, why, how—the bones of every good story. I built a whole career on asking those questions about other people.
What I didn’t realize, until much later than I’d like to admit, is that I’d had them backward when it came to myself.
Backwards Pursuits
For years I chased why. What’s my purpose, what’s my calling, what am I supposed to be doing with this one life.
But why was always running ahead of who, and you cannot reach your purpose by running from your person. I had to stop and ask the question I’d skipped: who am I underneath the marketing, the trending, the version of myself I thought would sell? Turns out the who of what I am is just me. Plain, dug-up, unpolished me.
What’s Inside This Episode
That’s the thread running through this episode, and it’s the thread I hope you’ll pull on too.
I talk about the eighth-grade journalism class that started it all, the years I spent telling everyone’s story but my own, and the six questions that finally helped me dig down to who I actually am instead of who I thought I should become.
Finding Your Sweet Spot
I also touch on a couple of the verses that cracked this open for me, but the line I keep coming back to is the back half of Ephesians 2:10, in the Amplified: “… which God prepared [for us] beforehand [taking paths which He set], so that we would walk in them [living the good life which He prearranged and made ready for us].”
Read that again slowly. The path was already set. The good life was already prepared. You’re not building your purpose from scratch—you’re walking into something God already laid out before you got here.
Here’s the part that still gets me: the people you’re called to reach are the people who look like you—who are walking through a story that may look a lot like the story you’ve walked through. Not someone else’s. Yours. The thing you’ve been hiding is very often the thing somebody else needed to hear ten years ago and never did.
I’m four books in now, working on a fifth, still learning that the collision of my honest story with God’s truth is the only sweet spot that’s ever actually worked. So maybe before you ask yourself what you’re supposed to do, look at yourself in the mirror and reflect on who you are called to share your message with and the rest tends to follow.
Love, Amber
Editor & Bestselling Author of #sisterhoodoftheshortyellowpencils: Mental Health Mayhem, One Sticky Note at a Time.
