How I Found My Purpose in Jewelry
My mission with M. Hisae is this: to walk the path of seeking beauty and ignite a deep and magnetic reverence for self through jewelry. This is narumi (origin: Japanese): achieving beauty, achieving truth, or the roaring of the sea. Life is beauty, and you are the sea.
Why jewelry? It’s been an ever-present question for almost a decade now. For most of those years, I couldn’t fully answer it. Not until very recently did I start to piece together the deeper connections beyond the bench being my refuge and creative outlet. Sitting in these epiphanies, small and large, is extremely freeing. It floods me with a sense of gratitude, for the journey, but mostly for the realization that the tools to finding the answers were so, so simple all along. Simple in form but complex when we must traverse the many mountains of assumptions that limit and constrict us.
Many of you have expressed your appreciation for the moments when I spoke on topics beyond jewelry. And because we are kindred spirits, your appreciation is a very valuable invitation to do more of that. Also, I couldn’t only ever talk about jewelry. It will be a common thread throughout, because it’s been one of my greatest teachers, but I’m interested in the whole of us, not just the jewelry-loving side.
I could have created anything with these hands, but I chose jewelry. Jewelry chose me. It's infusing my life with lessons in self-adoration, self-worth, sentimentality, and the power of adornment. In so many ways, it’s gifted me a sense of purpose.
Where to start with purpose…it’s a challenging and admirable thing to pursue a purpose-driven life. In current times especially, it takes courage to try to monetize passions, wait patiently for meaning to arise within a current career, or to switch careers, trusting that the journey will be fulfilling enough whether or not the end result is as expected. It will happen with divine timing, and it cannot be rushed, but I do think every person on this planet was born with unique messages and unique gifts that are waiting to be embraced and shared. There’s a reason you’re here, and there’s a lot of comfort in that.
Yet, we focus so much on external structure to guide us toward the feeling of fulfillment. What I mean by that is - it’s not about the job. Your career does not give you purpose, you give you purpose. The career can be a powerful tool, but it is not the only one. And! I think purpose is fluid. I like to see the goal as having a sense of purpose in every moment versus having one overarching purpose that we feel like we may never find.
For me, purpose is synonymous with a passion for life that embraces circumstance. Purpose is presence. Purpose also requires a rich sense of self-worth. To know that your message and your work matters, you must believe that you matter.
You are here to acknowledge and embrace every crevice of what it means to be you and to develop ways in which you can protect, celebrate, and project the wisdom of your experiences, both light and dark, into the world. This requires getting passionately curious about ourselves.
Most of us were not encouraged to do this. Most of us have been discouraged because blending in was the key to survival (*raises her hand*). Amidst getting curious, a natural connection will arise between who you are, why you’re here, and how, or through which avenues, you can share your message and gifts with the world at this stage. Your sense of purpose is not outside of you. The o-n-l-y place you will find it is within you. From within it will pour out.
How do we find it? Purpose is the soul’s work. Your work is letting it get to work. Release the grasp. The biggest feat is preventing your logical brain (and ego) from trying to micromanage a very intuitive, feelings-based journey. Please use your brain to translate the words on this page and then go ahead and shut it off until you need it for practical applications.
Back to the soul - what feeds the soul? Surrounding ourselves with things and experiences that are rooted in beauty, inspire joy, and fuel desire. These are your purest states, so it makes sense that the answers lie within them. Joy and desire were teachings gifted to me by a teacher, and it’s become the single most important practice in my life, aside from seeking beauty in everything I encounter.
When she first suggested I explore the role of desire in my life, I shuttered. It made me really uncomfortable. I have all the things I need, and I live a creatively-driven life. Desiring more than what I already had seemed greedy or ungrateful (false). But I felt exhausted and, frankly, unfulfilled living a life that was so X-Y-Z, but I didn’t know WHY. I know I’m not alone in that feeling.
I started to ask why. I’m not hurting anyone by wanting more, i.e. being more of myself and wanting more for myself, so why? Before I could dive into desire, I had to understand what was blocking it. It was all centered around self-worth. I was harboring so many baseless assumptions and truths that, in my first few decades on Earth, I had just accepted but never examined. I couldn’t un-know that realization, so I started examining further. Whenever anxiety or a disempowering feeling arose, I asked: Is it true and is it mine? I realized that so many of my thoughts weren’t really mine. Or they were a third mine, a third someone else’s and a third society’s, dimmed to help me blend in comfortably.
Being here writing all of this to you feels inherently uncomfortable because I’m stepping outside of a box that I assumed you thought I was in. But I’ve always known that wasn’t my box. My friends, you’ve always known that wasn’t your box. The coping mechanisms of our pasts were natural and were part of the journey. We love them, we appreciate them, but we’re ready for the next level.
It was in the act of surrendering to my very specific energies of joy and desire that brought me so much ease, so much flow, a hell of a lot of clarity, and a big dose of self-respect. I started to feel like myself again.
So, that’s how I found my sense of purpose - in a state of joy, in allowing my desire to run free because I believed I was worthy of it. Jewelry is joy. My sense of purpose, at least right now, lies in walking the path of seeking beauty and igniting a deep and magnetic reverence for self through jewelry.
If I believed that jewelry has the power to transform, then I had to own up to the possibility that that my jewelry has the power to transform. You remind me of that daily. I feel deep, deep gratitude for you and for that.
I want everyone to feel a deep love and reverence for themselves and the people and things they surround themselves with. I found it in the undefined parts of me - the places where I dredged through the most sadness and confusion and learned the biggest lessons. The places where I didn’t think my joy mattered and the times when I didn’t think I deserved more. These are the places where I gained the most wisdom because I had to work so much harder to retrain my brain to take a backseat to my soul.
Wisdom is beautiful. You’ve been through some shit. Don’t diminish it. Why did life deliver to you such painful and sad experiences, and why do you think you made it out, stronger and wiser? That is not by accident. There is life happening to you and there is life happening for you. Your darkest moments are likely to be the ones that birthed the most wisdom, and your most joyous moments are likely the ones that brought out passions you never knew were in you.
Are you starting to see just how much you have to learn from you? Now imagine if your favorite people kept their great wisdom and great passions in hiding. I’m not about exposing you before you’re ready, but let me be the first of many to remind you: your work matters.
If you feel inspired to share any part of your journey, reach out. I’m the only one who sees your emails, and your stories are safe with me. Plus, I’m a sucker for a heart-to-heart. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for being here.
With love,
Michelle