By two years after my university graduation, I had learned that my degree in teaching had been a wrong career choice. The creative aspect fulfilled me, but the total effort was exhausting. I took a part-time position in a university library organizing the work but not doing it, found an excuse and left. Briefly a part-time secretary, I couldn’t keep my mind on the work for my own thoughts intruding. I used my creativity to develop a handmade necktie business then taught in adult school, but neither continued. When I read about a test that measured your ability related to what work suited you, I wished that I could take it but not for four hundred dollars. One sentence in the article shocked me: a secretary and an eye surgeon needed a similar ability. The explanation that both had to fully focus on the work opened a new view of finding what was right for me. (I couldn’t fully focus for ideas streaming through me.) I entered a time when I first led a writing community followed (due to a move) by giving psychic readings. I enjoyed both as they energized me. I was learning more about the truth of myself.
Then I discovered the work of cultural anthropologist, Angeles Arrien in Signs of Life, The Five Universal Shapes and How to Use Them. Taking the test in the book, when I read the interpretations of my answers it was like looking in a mirror. Revealed by my choices, I recognized my inner self and world view from my successful experiences. Of the five shapes—square, circle, equidistant cross, spiral, and triangle—my most preferred were (and still are) the triangle and the spiral with their meanings of “dreams and goals” and “growth.” As an intuitive counselor, I later imaged those shapes many times for myself and my clients. I no longer have Angeles’s book, but in the fuller description I remember of the triangle, I had found my driving force as being creative.
My realization is, “We may find the truth of ourselves in something as simple as a shape.”