My husband and I consider ourselves to be animal lovers. We have had five dogs over our twenty years together. Four of those have been rescue dogs.

Rescue dogs are often mixed breeds. When adopting one, especially if it’s a puppy, you’re not quite sure what mix of breeds you’re getting. With an older dog, you can normally get some idea of the breeds involved by the look of the dog.

The rescue organisation will try to help as much as possible with their best guess, or based on what the person who surrendered the pups told them, but that’s not always reliable information.

Dogs are driven by instinct which is influenced by their breed. Characteristics that only come to the fore as they mature. It’s better, for the owner and the dog, to work with a dog’s nature and temperament than against it.

Part of the journey with a rescue puppy is that you’ll only discover their innate instincts and characteristics as they mature.

For me, discovering my own nature has taken some experimentation as well.

I felt so different to my family growing up that for years I was convinced that I was adopted. The likelihood of that explanation was dispelled when complete strangers would walk up to me saying, “you must be your mother’s child because you look just like her.” 

Adding to the complexity of me not relating to my relatives was the constant disruptions to my external environment with our regular moving from town to town and city to city. This forced my focus to be on figuring out each new external environment.

Then I repeated the pattern.

It was always assumed that I would study further after high school but, when I thought about the options of what I would study, I couldn’t make a decision. None of the options stood out to me. However, when I thought about travelling and backpacking that really lit a fire in my belly.

So in the middle of my last year of high school that’s what  I decided I was going to do.

My decision was not well-received by my parents. My dad told me that this would be the stupidest thing I’d ever done. My mother told me that I thought I knew everything. I responded, “No, it’s because I feel like I know nothing about myself. I need to find out.”

My inner voice spoke in dissent from the voices around me. It’s the first time I recall listening.

Essentially I was figuring out who I was by comparing myself to those around me. I was looking for some commonalities and, so far in my life experience, I hadn’t found enough to satisfy me.

Travelling helped me with that. A world away I discovered people from all over who thought like I did, with interests that held my attention, conversations that stimulated me. The world I unearthed was big, beautiful, exciting and textured. I blossomed in that environment. In those foreign lands, I no longer felt foreign to myself.

That quiet voice inside me that said, “go, explore” served me well. Distance and new surroundings gave me a new perspective not only of myself but of what was possible.

I decided I liked exploring. I liked travelling.

As most independent travellers will tell you, you can have some of your best experiences when you get lost. The other side of that perspective is that you can also have some of your worst.

In surveying the unknown I discovered lots of good fits for me, but I also found myself lost, turned around, trying to figure out how I got there.

One Saturday morning, soon after my 30th birthday, I sat surrounded by packed boxes, labelled with where they came from and where they were going to.

I’d had a lot of experience moving homes but this was the first time I was leaving a marriage. As I waited for the moving truck to arrive, I wondered, how the fuck did this happen? How did I end up here?

A few months prior, I had spent a week in bed crippled by a raging fever that I just couldn’t seem to break. I often joke that if I bump my toe, I’ll run a fever. But this fever felt different. This fever said, “there’s something up, Cathleen, pay attention!”

Part of me didn’t want to face it. The fever persisted. I was laid out, unable to move, exhausted. A physical mirror of how I felt inside. I needed help. Eventually, I picked up the phone and made an appointment with a therapist.

When I saw her the following week she asked, “why are you here?” I spoke for 45 minutes in answer to that question. I ended my monologue with, “I need to understand how I got here because I never want to do this again.”  That, and subsequent sessions, provided me with some answers.

But the driving force that propelled me to that morning, making another move, was that it felt like the pilot light of my spirit was about to be extinguished. A little voice was telling me to get out of there! Go!

As I’ve written about previously, I had already lost my voice, wasn’t writing, wasn’t journaling. But this felt like next level shit. This felt like my survival was at stake. Not my physical survival. The survival of my essence, my vitality, my spirit.

Whether you’ve lost your keys or your way, you’ll know that often the first step is to start retracing your steps.

As I sat there contemplating the existential question, what the fuck, Cathleen? I took a moment to review.

I knew I could be happy, I just had to turn to my journals for evidence of that. I also knew that I didn’t have to be in a relationship to be happy. This gave me a glimmer of hope because, at this point, I thought I would be alone, would want to be alone, for the rest of my life.

I told myself that my standards were too high. My idea of what a relationship could be was too far-fetched. It was never going to happen so best get used to being alone. Happy and alone was preferable to married, unhappy and lonely.

I entered into a pact with myself. I promised myself that I was not going to compromise on the ideal of what I thought a relationship could be. I was not going to squish myself to fit into a relationship where I couldn’t fully be me. I was not going to make myself small so that someone else could feel tall. It was going to be my ideal or bust!

That promise was the shield to my pilot light that I took with me.

I felt released; as if I stepped out of living in an etching into the colour burst of a Georgia O’Keeffe painting!

That little voice may only have been able to squeak, “go” but I was really pleased that I had listened to it.

Nine months later I started dating my now husband.

On paper, this relationship didn’t seem like a natural fit. I was a financial manager in the corporate world, he was a maths teacher and eight years younger than me. I was 31 and he was 24. A number of family and friends offered unsolicited advice that I should know better and move on.

But something about this relationship felt different. Everything about this relationship felt different.

The first time we went away together I realised how easy it was being together, making decisions together, having fun together. I checked in with him and he felt the same way.

What we were discovering is that it is easier to partner with someone when you collaborate well together. We were both active participants in co-creating the relationship that we wanted. We valued each other and the relationship we were creating.

My now, not so little voice, said to me: this IS different, this is what you want, it may not work out but let’s find out. So we did. And it is. Actually, it’s even better than I thought it could be.

Turns out it wasn’t that my standards were too high. I just needed a person capable of meeting them. I could be fully me - tough cookie and vulnerable little girl.

“On paper” has meant nothing and what we have is everything.

I’m dark-haired and fair-skinned. Most of my teenage years were spent in a beach town where being blonde, blue-eyed and tanned were the ideal. I almost get burnt at a full moon.

Sometimes feeling like we don’t belong comes from what we see in our external environment. At times, even if we look like those around us, we still feel like we don’t belong, connect, relate.

We are regularly bombarded with messages about the external - look this way, buy this and you’ll feel wonderful, act this way to fit in.

We grow up with Disney movies where you can see the evil nature of the person or creature by the way they look. Hollywood, Bollywood is constantly trying to represent internal feelings with exterior, visible things.  

External messages are continually telling us this outward thing will make you feel this way inside. I think that’s the wrong way round. I think when we listen to our internal message, that small voice inside, our experience of our outer world will change. 

We will feel true to our nature, authentic. Working with our characters provides harmony, congruency, that working against it can never achieve.

Paying attention, acknowledging what we are drawn to, what we are driven to. Moving more towards ourselves quietens the feelings of unease. The feeling of discomfort is a calling from your true self. Answer the call instead of hushing the voice.

Our internal selves, our feelings, our mental health has an enormous impact on our life experience. Trust that knowing voice. Get to know it.

Glennon Doyle, in her spectacular book “Untamed”, writes about how she took her family to see a cheetah. She describes how the handlers bring out a Labrador dog to run after a scruffy stuffed toy on the back of a car. This, the handler tells the crowd, will remind the cheetah how to do it.

The cheetah watches the dog run after the stuffed animal and then it’s the cheetah’s turn. Explosive speed reveals how the cheetah is made for this. Afterwards, the cheetah can be seen in the background, caged, staring at the horizon.

It’s an impactful story, as is the whole book, but the image, that feeling of that cheetah looking out that cage to the beyond...that sense of freedom she had for a moment when she realised her full potential...when she was utterly and thoroughly herself...that gets me every time.

It’s so easy for us to see the difference between the cheetah and the Labrador. But it’s not that easy for that cheetah. She doesn’t know that there’s a logical fallacy to assuming that she’s the same as the dog. She just has this feeling of unease. That’s all she has to go on.

That’s often all any of us have to go on. A feeling of discontent deep within us. A gentle internal nudge. A gap, a hole, a wistful questioning. It’s nebulous, imprecise and often defies logic; which is why we often brush it aside, stifle or ignore it. 

The thing is if we pay attention to it. If we seek it out, if we go within, if we quiet the noisy yapping of the dogs...we may hear the low hum of a purr, the swish of our tail, feel the shiver of spotted fur, tension in our feet, our body waiting to leap.

Don’t let the Labradors around you convince you that you’re a Labrador. If you feel different if you feel like that’s not you, if you yearn for something else, if you feel caged, trust that feeling. Listen to your inner voice, your intuition, your spirit; whatever you want to call it.

Don’t participate in silencing your inner voice. Don’t gaslight yourself. Stop telling yourself to be happy because the Labradors around you are happy. Maybe what makes them happy was never meant to make you happy.

Maybe you have to strike out, alone and explore the wilderness beyond. Maybe get lost, turned around. 

Learn to hone your inner voice. Maybe it will start as a murmur. Maybe if you listen it will grow into a whisper. Lean in. That’s your call and when you hear that call in others you’ll know that you’ve found your coalition of cheetahs.

If your internal voice is a bark and you’re surrounded by Labradors, good for you. But if it sounds more like a purr and a growl to you, maybe it’s time to consider that you’re not built to run after stuffed toys. 

Maybe those spots, those moments of quiet when you hear the call of your spirit, are telling you that you are different from those around you. That in fact you’re lost, you’re not home.

Maybe it’s time to look to the horizon, to trust your call to explore.