I'm a walk-in, a homesick Starseed, born into the wrong family or without a plan — what do I do with my life?
From one “misfit soul” to another: it ain't easy, but we can find our way! 😉
Our reality is designed by an incredible intelligence. A typical person comes into this life with a “map”: a purpose, direction, a few life lessons, and major events planned for this incarnation, as well as with a network of important people who will share this journey with them — family, partner, close friends...
The soul incarnates, proceeds with the overall plan, and life generally makes sense.
However, there’s a percentage of us that arrive here in more unusual, less orderly ways, and for us, navigating life can be a different kind of game.
This article is for those of you who know or feel that there's something different about the way you landed in this incarnation, and you're having difficulty finding meaning, belonging, and direction in life as a result.
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So, what's your story?
Are you brand new to planet Earth and missing your family in the stars?
Are you a walk-in, feeling uneasy in someone else's body and life story, with family and friends who feel like total strangers to you?
Were you born into a different family and culture than planned, oceans away from all of your soul family?
Did something unexpected happen? Perhaps your life didn’t unfold according to your soul’s plan, and now you can't get back on track and aren't sure what to do with your life? (This could be due to trauma, your choices, or other people’s choices that significantly altered your path.)
Our journeys are all unique, but we may share similar feelings.
“I'm too different.”
“I feel out of place.”
“I don't belong in this family, culture, society, or on this planet.”
“It feels like I’m supposed to be somewhere else instead.”
“My family and friends feel like strangers, I don’t have many memories of them, and we have little in common.”
“I'm isolated, no one can truly see or understand me, and there’s no support network for me in this world.”
“I'm homesick without knowing where my true home is.”
“There's no place saved for me in this web of reality, I can never fit in.”
“I feel like an extra piece on a chessboard that has no assigned role in this game of life, I’m just taking up space.”
“There's no plan for my life and life doesn't make sense — I'm just going through the motions and making it up as I go.”
“I’ve been pushed onto the stage and told to improvise. What should I do with my time on Earth?”
How many boxes did you check? ✅🙂
First of all, let's give you a little pep talk, fellow misfit. 😉
Consider these three points:
1. All human identities are temporary costumes.
Humans naturally want to belong. We want to have an identity. But guess what: ultimately we're all just souls in disguise, playing temporary roles.
Many find comfort in their identification with a culture, family lineage, profession, social circle, purpose, cause. In the absence of that… you're just closer to the truth.
You can play around with different identities, but underneath, you're a soul, and you may not even be from this planet, so why lament not being identified with something temporary that is only relevant on Earth?
2. You have a permanent unique nature that no one can take away from you.
You may not have a plan, a soul family around you, a strong identity, a defined purpose... You may have walked into someone else's life. But guess what: there's something intrinsically and eternally yours that no one can take away from you.
It's your true soul essence. Your soul's blueprint, experience, and history are uniquely yours. You have a set of divine gifts and characteristics that are eternal and unchanging, and they shine through in every incarnation, no matter who you are, where you live, or what you do in that life.
You can lean onto that eternal nature now, make that your identity rather than something temporary, and consciously choose how to embody your soul gifts in a way that makes you happy.
3. You've got more freedom than most!
It can feel disorienting and lonely when you don't have a specific plan or mission nor soul contracts with other people in this life, but there's a silver lining to that. Instead of being held to a plan or stuck in drama-filled karmic relationships, you have tremendous freedom to choose how to spend your time and what to make your life about.
You're in a minority of souls who get to write their own story with almost no limitations. Use that freedom to shape your life in a way that makes you happy! It's a rare opportunity!
So what do I do now?
Let's say you just found out that you're a walk-in, or were born into the wrong family, or something else went awry, leaving you pondering what to do with this life and how to find a place for yourself in this world. What do you do?
There's no such thing as the “right” way to deal with an unusual “incarnation situation”. This is not science! :) I would like to simply offer some steps that make sense and have worked for me and for the people I've helped deal with similar circumstances. Some may not be applicable in your unique situation. Take this as inspiration and, as always, follow your inner knowing.
1. Find out what really happened to you.
In some cases, learning the truth can be heartbreaking, and you might wonder if it would have been better to not even know.
I believe that ultimately, truth is empowering. When we have clarity about what happened to us and why, we can make peace with it, close that chapter, and make the best choices for our life going forward. Basing decisions on incomplete understanding, doubt, or self-deception is likely to ultimately backfire at some point.
By “learning the truth” I don't mean reading articles like “10 signs you're a starseed/walk-in/etc”. 😅 It's best to use a reliable method for accessing information about the soul and its incarnation plan. That can be done through the Akashic Records, Regression, channeling of the Higher Self or Guides, and other methods. Of course, we want to make sure we can trust our own ability to receive that information, or trust the skills of the practitioner we're working with.
2. Grieve.
While our discomfort and disorientation can be due to very “benign” reasons, like being new to the planet, some people’s soul stories can actually be quite sad, at least from a human perspective.
Some folks may find out that they were supposed to be born as a totally different person, surrounded by their loving soul family, but — through choice or deception — they ended up somewhere else, and now they're merely a shadow of that person, living in isolation thousands of miles away.
Others may realize they're a gentle star child who had great things to accomplish for humanity, but was crushed by the unexpected difficulty of living on this planet.
Yet others may learn that they took on another soul's burdens and trauma by swapping places with it, and the healing path ahead is long and arduous.
In cases like these, a natural first step will be to grieve — what is and what could've been.
I'm not a fan of gaslighting oneself or sugarcoating anything. Based on my work with many clients, as well as my own journey, platitudes like “Everything unfolds as it's meant to be”, “It's all for your own good”, “You must have chosen this as a lesson” are not always true… As wise as our souls are, they aren't always realistic about the challenges they take on; they can't control what exactly will happen; other people's choices can sabotage our life plan; old traumas can get triggered unexpectedly and stop us in our tracks... so many things can, in fact, go wrong!
Of course, this is not an excuse to give up — we're resilient and can find our way. But first, we should allow ourselves to take the time to go through the process of grieving whatever happened (or should have happened) to us. It’s not wise to make significant life decisions until we're on the other side of grief and have come to a state of peace.
There is no requirement to be completely free of grief and sorrow, and to start seeing what happened as a positive thing — it may not be possible or even appropriate. We may always carry some sadness about our story. What I mean here is: if our grief is disabling, we want to integrate it enough to be able to function again before proceeding to next steps.
3. Take inventory.
Now that we understand our “incarnation situation” and what happened to us, it's good to take inventory of our inner resources — to get a bigger and clearer picture of our life as well as possible paths open to us.
Questions to consider:
- What do I know about my soul identity? (What soul group do I come from? What overall purpose does my soul have in this Universe?)
- What are my natural gifts and strengths? (What does my soul blueprint, astrology, Human Design, etc. or my self-knowledge say about my natural gifts and strengths?)
- Do I have any predetermined life lessons left to learn at this point?
- Does my soul have an intention for how it wants to serve and contribute to humanity at this time, or is that completely up to me?
- Based on what I know now about my soul situation, do I need to change anything? (E.g., develop certain gifts, move to another location, try to re-connect with soul family, express myself differently, change career, etc.)
4. Consciously choose your path.
Once we have the lay of the land, it's time to make lemonade out of our lemons! (or tomatoes, or whatever you're stuck with in this life! 😉)
Our situation may not be ideal, we may not have the support and resources we should've had, there may be constraints and limitations to deal with... Yet we still have our soul gifts and our Free Will, and at this point, we get to decide how we want to show up in the world and apply our gifts, what we want to create, and how we want to write our story and carve our path going forward.
You can ask yourself:
- Knowing that I get to choose, who do I want to be in this life?
- What activities or causes draw my attention and curiosity?
- What would I enjoy doing with my time and energy?
- What is worth my time and energy?
- Which of those ideas would be a natural fit based on my gifts, strengths, skills, and experience?
- Is there a real need in the world that I can address through those aligned activities?
You see, when our path is unusual, often there's less predetermination. Therefore, sitting and waiting to be “told by Spirit” what we “should” do can be futile.
It is important to notice signs and clues and follow our intuition, but the balance of destiny vs. conscious Free Will choice weighs heavily towards the latter for us. And sometimes, we'll simply have to sit and think and make a logical decision about where we want to go from here!
Know that most of the time, a decision doesn't commit us to a certain path for the rest of our life. We can always course-correct! We can change out path every few years if we want to. So don't be afraid to just pick something “for now”, “for the next two years”, and get the ball rolling. You'll learn what works and doesn't work for you while you're on the path. If you sit there waiting for the Universe to tell you what to do, you'll likely be waiting forever!
Embrace the adventure
Yes, you may not be where you would want to be. But can you look upon this human life as just another adventure for the soul?
Our soul wants to experience everything: male, female, other species, different planet, every culture, every societal role... It would be so boring if we were always in the same role, place, and with the same group of souls in every lifetime!
See if you can reframe your current life as an adventure, as something new to try. Lean into it the way an actor embraces a new role, and make the best out of it while it lasts – our human life is so short!
“How can I be the best version of this character and have the most fun on this adventure (and maybe do something good for others while I'm at it)?"
Be curious while experiencing yourself in a new way, even if it feels very strange and uncomfortable. In the back of your mind, you know: it's all just temporary costumes that we wear. You are the same unique soul that you will always remain, and no one can take that away from you. After having fun on the stage of life all day, during quiet moments of reflection or meditation, you can “come home” to the “real you” — your soul essence.
Make it an art project
If your “soul situation” is such that you feel there is no plan, no meaning, no purpose to your existence, here’s a perspective shift that might help.
Forget about finding purpose. Don’t take the journey so seriously! Approach yourself and your life as an art project. You’re a “free agent”. Play around and shape your life whichever way you fancy! There’s no pressure for it to have a meaning or serve a purpose. An art project doesn’t have a serious purpose — it’s just an expression of our creativity, and our souls have an inherent impulse to create. So what would you like to create?
Don’t walk alone
Lastly, don't isolate yourself, even if you feel that there's nobody around who could possibly understand you. Prolonged isolation is terrible for our mental health, and that can affect our ability to serve our purpose and be effective in this world.
Being with others doesn't have to require their complete understanding of your complex inner world and galactic history. :) Just being in someone's presence — chatting up a neighbor, volunteering at a beach cleanup, etc. — can lift our spirits, give us a boost of joy, and help ground us in the “real world”.
And there are always people you can connect with over the same interests — they may not be in your local community, but they're out there! I can't tell you how many clients have remarked to me that they have “no one to talk to about these things”. I joke that: yes, a few hundred people have told me the same thing, which means that there are at least a few hundred potential friends out there for you — now go join some online group class or forum and meet them! 😉
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Did this help you?
Are you inspired to take a new action to find more meaning in your life?
I'd love to hear your reflections and what’s helped you on your own journey.
© 2023 Julia Nord | All rights reserved | Copying, adapting, imitating, or creating derivative works of this content is prohibited.