This Is When You’re Supposed To Follow Your Heart

I’m a very logical person. I grew up with a mom who was fairly whimsical and a best friend who never put limits on things that were possible, so naturally I leaned a little more to the realistic side of things. “Let’s be practical here,” I was known to say whenever a new adventure or idea popped into their heads.

I was the grounded one, always operating under the premise that sometimes the things we wanted to do were not always possible and most times down right impractical and inefficient.

I was a follow your head type of girl.

If something didn’t make sense, well then, it didn’t make sense. I am still in large part a woman who likes to live her life linearly, in black and white with very little patent for the ambiguous grey areas, sometimes voiding out my more emotional feeling for what should be instead of what could be. I was happy living my life that way until I I was ushered into my mid twenties and everything changed.

I, of course, am aware of how that sounds. Your early twenties should be the time in your life where you throw caution to the wind and impulsively do whatever you want. 21, 22, 23, those are the ages when you’re not worried about doing the logical thing, all that matters is that you follow your bliss,” and “do what inspires you” phrases I thought we’re both ridiculous and extremely irresponsible when I was that age. I didn’t mind being in the majority when it came to things like, “everyone needs the realistic one in the group, to keep you all from being arrested,” I would say to my friends most of the time.

But then, at 24 I did the opposite of what I had been doing my whole life. 2.5 years into a pretty solid relationship I decided to call it quits even though we had to been living together for a year and an engagement was closely on the horizon. I didn’t have a particularly good reason for doing this, things were good and stable, and it made sense that marriage would have been the logical next step. Yet, overtime I thought about it and my heart just wasn’t in it.

I could give no reason, just the feeling that I wanted something else, something more.

They say that it takes some time to get use to trusting your instincts, but mainly I couldn’t trust mine because it was scary and at many points unjustifiable. But as I step into my late twenties I find myself more willing to trust my gut than the linear plan I’ve arbitrarily set out for my self. If it feels good, if it feels right, isn’t that all you need to chose following your heart? A lot of times it won’t make sense, but thats how you know that you’re making the right decision for you and not just because it’s a decision you should make.

Why not follow your bliss when it comes to your dreams? Why not do what inspires you when it comes to your career? Why not be impulsive when it comes to love and relationships?

I’m not saying you have to pick heart over head every time, but do you really want to be the person who only does things that are realistic? The thing about dreamers, people who trust their guts, people who follow their hearts, is that for them nothing is impossible. Odds may be stacked against you and you might even have people telling you what you think is possible is, in fact, ridiculous, but in that case you’d be in good company, company like Barack Obama, Oprah, and Mark Zuckerberg.

It’s not a bad thing to want something that is illogical. Albert Einstein once said, “logic will get you from point A to point B, but imagination will bring you anywhere.” Give yourself the benefit of that doubt that even in the worst case scenario, even if it doesn’t work out and turns out to be a huge mess, listening to what you really want is never a bad thing. You’ll know when that moment comes, you’ll know when you’re supposed to follow your heart.