I am, by just about every societal metric I know of, a lesser being than my friend Julie.

She earns a lot of money, I earn none.

She has a gorgeous house and a nice car, and I do not.

She had an easy time getting pregnant, and I have not.

She has more friends than I do, better skin than me, a much more impressive wardrobe, and she’s adored by everyone who’s ever met her (well, maybe not Pittsburgh police officers — they weren’t fans of either of us during our rowdy college years).

And…

I am so goddamn delighted by going through the world as Keely Marie Carney Copeland that I wouldn’t trade lives with her for all the money in the world.

There’s not a single human walking the Earth who I would trade lives with. Not even the Dalai Lama (he was my last holdout).

This didn’t used to be true. Enneagram wisdom says that each personality type has a specific vice, and my vice is envy. There have been plenty of chapters in my life where the green-eyed monster made me covet other people’s lives.

What also happened to be true during those times was that I hadn’t yet reclaimed my personal power (reclaiming your personal power is pretty much the entire point of Andean shamanism).

When I looked around, envying others, I was trapped in a false narrative.

I mistakenly believed that our culture’s narrow definition of success was right. And, because meeting our culture’s definition of success seemed to come easier to people like Julie, I thought that they were living a lucky lifetime and I was living an unlucky one.

Then, through my study of shamanism, astrology, Human Design and the Gene Keys, I learned a different storyline. 

In my current worldview, each of us is built EXACTLY as we need to be built to do what we came here to do.

If I were built like Julie, then I wouldn’t be able to help people overcome depression, because I never would have overcome depression. You can’t overcome depression and have a hopeful message to share if you never have depression in the first place…

If I were built like Julie, I wouldn’t access over-the-top feelings of bliss and gratitude while writing essays because I wouldn’t have spent my childhood sitting alone in trees reading books and developing a lifelong devotion to the written word.

If I were built like Julie, Sam and I wouldn’t have the relationship we have and I literally texted Sam the other day to say, “Thank you for a marriage that is the best part of my life.”

If I were built like Julie…lots of things.

AND!

If Julie were built like me, then she wouldn’t be able to do the things that she came here to do.

Same with Sam and my mom and my brothers and Liz Gilbert and you and your people and their people and…

What “success” looks like for me will always be somewhat different than what “success” looks like for you. Because each of us came here to do something slightly different with our life.

And I wish we all got to feel in our bones how very, very, VERY liberating that is.

In freedom,

Keely