Information Junkie: I’m One, Are You?

Hi, my name is Janet and I am an information junkie.  

Can you relate?  

Perhaps you can resonate with this. Perhaps like me, you have the need to continually accumulate more and more information before you put yourself out there.

You've got a skill or a gift that wants to come out, but you're just not ready until you know more and more and more and more.  

My mother is a hoarder. She is a tidy hoarder. You wouldn't know walking in her house that the cabinets were full of little bottles of shampoo that she collected from hotels over the years. Or, that she had hundred of sponges under the sink. 

One time when I was visiting, I took all of her coffee mugs out of the cabinets and set them on the kitchen counters. Before she came in, I asked her how many mugs she had. She estimated eight. I said guess again. She said maximum 12. Guess again. In total she had 72 coffee mugs. (She lives alone.) 

In a different way, I too had become a hoarder. I learned it from mom. But instead of things, I hoarded information.

I most likely had more than 72 scraps of paper crammed with valuable information I couldn't bear to part with. It was information that I NEEDED before I could put myself out there.

I couldn't trust what I knew, without a constant need to back it up with confirmation from other sources.  

An Embarrassing Story 

I'll tell you an embarrassing story. Over the course of my years, starting from when I was a child, I collected phrases. I always wanted to be a writer, and whenever I read a novel, I scribbled down amazing metaphor or phrases that came to me that exactly captured that moment that I was reading about.

Somehow, somewhere, sometime, I might be able to fit that phrase into one of my own books. I had scraps of paper in boxes with brilliant phrases on them.  

Of course over the years, I forgot they were there. I never looked at them again. But that didn't stop me from creating them.  

And why didn't I need to ever look at them again? Because those brilliant phrases were inside of me.

At any moment I could recreate anything I wanted. I didn't need an old scrap of paper to make me feel like I could be a brilliant writer.  

I did find one of those papers later. And I went over a book I had written and inserted some of those ideas.

But, it was stale energy now. The words laid flat on the pages. The excitement I had felt when I first created them was gone. Now they were just letters typed on paper.

It was almost as if, lying there in black and white, they were a statement to the lack of self-worth that I had felt for so long. I'm not good enough to create.

And when I went back and re-read those paragraphs, they stuck out like sore thumbs to me. I removed every single one of them. 

Inspiration Instead of Information  

When you live exclusively "in form", then you concentrate on accumulating "in-form-ation".  

In other words, when you live solely in your head, information is the most important thing. It's the feeling of, I need to absolutely know the answer to something before I can act on it. 

You need to immerse yourself in inspiration as well as information.  

Living in inspiration is a state that compels you to bring ideas into fruition. It's that spark that ignites a fire within you. It drives you to achieve your goals and get past your limitations. 

When you have inspiration, you awaken to new possibilities and then a desire to act on those insights. And when you do this, you're happy. 

Information, on the other hand, is the raw material upon which inspiration can build.

But information alone can be static and unengaging (say for instance if it's sitting on scraps of paper in a cardboard box) unless it's combined with inspiration.  

Information is necessary to build a foundation of knowledge, but inspiration is the catalyst that transforms that knowledge into action.  

Hi my name is Janet and I am an inspiration junkie  

I still love information. But I don't have a  box of papers scribbled with everything I need to know in life.

I don't need verification from outside of myself (even if that verification came from me) to tell me that I can put myself out there.

And I'm confident that my own inner wisdom and intuition will provide the information I need at the exact time I need it. 

Always accumulating more information was sending a message to my brain that I was unprepared. In a way, it was reinforcing in myself that I was an imposter posing as someone who was knowledgeable.

Imposter syndrome means that you need to be a perfectionist, or an expert, or a natural genius, or superhuman before you can present yourself to the world. 

In My Dreams 

My dream at 7 years old was to become an author. And eventually I did write several books.

But I failed to promote them, because, well, um, maybe they're just not good enough. Maybe I have to be a better writer before I can sell a book in the window of the bookstore.  

I didn't know how to interpret my nightly dreams back then. But my dreams were telling me that I needed to write.

They were telling me that I needed to make my writing public, and reinforcing to me that, although I still loved gathering information and learning, it was the inspiration, and action of putting my work out there, that would bring me happiness.  

And of course my dreams told me exactly the limiting beliefs that were holding me back. Well, you expected that didn't you?