When You Get Blindsided

Last Friday, my husband and I got some news that felt like someone snuck up behind us with a sledgehammer and hit us straight over the head. It was confusing, disorienting, and so different from everything we’d been told up until that point. I can’t give super specific details, because it’s not fully my story to tell, and my husband is a more private person than I am. But I do want to talk about the times in life when we feel blindsided or betrayed, when it shakes us to our core and makes us question our faith.

I remember something my acting teacher told me a few years ago: sometimes things are just incredibly unfair.

You’ll be great for the part.

You’ll give your best work.

And one of the executives could be going through a nasty divorce, and you just happen to look a little too much like his ex-wife for him to give the approval. That’s not what happened in our case, but I think it’s an incredibly comparable example. There are these moments in life that have nothing to do with our qualifications, our ability to execute, or who we really are, honestly, at any level. Someone else gets to make a judgment based on ego or pettiness, and it dramatically changes the course of our life.

Let’s say you were up for a series regular role on a network show and you managed to get through five to seven stages of auditioning all the way to the network, only to have someone decide you look a little too much like their ex-wife and stop you from getting a role that could have shifted the whole course of your career.

That’s the thing I keep coming back to.

The part of this that bumps up against my faith, and maybe it’s not just my faith in God but my faith in humanity, is when people get away with immoral, unfounded decisions that so largely impact other people’s lives. And it especially jars me when that person is surrounded by others in their environment who allow for that kind of behavior.

So, safe to say, something to that effect happened to our family, and we found out about it Friday.

My immediate reaction was anger. Anger at the unfairness of it. Anger at the irresponsibility of it. And I guess anger at the fact that people can get away with this and somehow find it appropriate.

Most of you reading this probably haven’t had that exact scenario happen to you, but I’d bet you’ve had a version of it: a moment where you felt like you didn’t get a fair trial, where a decision was made that didn’t account for your merits or who was truly worthy in the situation. I’ve seen it with clients over the years too, how these kinds of rejections sting so much more than the fair-and-square ones. Like a role I went up for a couple weeks ago that I never heard back on. I was excited about it, I think I did a great job to my ability — and it sucks, of course it stings — but there’s a level of peace in a fair rejection.

You can just say, hey, I don’t know, maybe they didn’t like my take, maybe they wanted someone older, maybe they saw someone with different color hair and it just clicked for them, and I’ll never know, but I put my best foot forward, and I have a real ability to find peace and move on from that kind of rejection.

It’s a lot harder when you’ve already jumped through the hoops, you’ve already been told you’re a great fit, and then the rug gets pulled out from under you right before the deal is signed.

So I wanted to talk about how I actually work through that kind of disappointment, that kind of faith-shake.

The first thing I learned when I was a teenager, hilariously enough, was from a Jennifer Aniston interview in Cosmo.

Her yoga teacher had told her something about dealing with breakups: that she gets two or three days to be sad and mopey, to eat the ice cream, to cry to her friends, to linger in the disappointment. And then she pulls herself back up, moves forward, and gets back to her practice, back to the habits that feel good, back to focusing on what’s next and what’s possible.

I took that on in my younger years with dating, and I was reminded of it this weekend.

We gave ourselves the weekend to process it, to be disappointed and frustrated, to feel our feelings. Honestly, we didn’t even take the whole weekend before we were already having those conversations: okay, what does this mean for moving forward? What have we learned? What goal can be mined from this?

I think those conversations were possible partly because we let ourselves actually feel the frustration first, and partly because that’s where my spiritual practice took over. I went into prayer. Dear God, I’m so angry. I’m upset. I feel bamboozled. What was going on here? Show me how this is actually for my highest good. Help me find peace in this situation.

I think this is the part that trips people up when we feel blindsided or betrayed: it’s not only by the people involved in the situation. On some level, we feel betrayed by a higher power too.

We deserved this thing, it doesn’t feel fair, it doesn’t feel right, and it’s easy to use that as a reason to turn our back on faith and spiritual connection.

But it’s also an opportunity to dive even deeper into it, to amp up the prayer and meditation practice until we get into a space where we can see it from the mountaintop view instead of just fixating on the thing we wanted that didn’t happen.

Because in that moment, when we’re only focused on what didn’t happen, it’s very hard to see the bigger picture. But there’s always more to be seen. And we have an opportunity, even mid-struggle, to claim what we want to believe.

My prayer this weekend was something like: I want to believe that everything is happening for our highest good. I want to believe that if this opportunity fell apart the way it did, that was divine redirection, maybe even divine protection. That there was something greater around the corner that needed the space to come in.

You’re not going to fully receive that at first, not while you’re still stuck in the heart-box of anger and frustration. But if you keep it as your fervent prayer, if you keep repeating it as those intense feelings come up, eventually a little bit of the light gets in. You start seeing: oh, well, hmm, what about that? Or maybe it could be that. Sometimes you even get little messages, a third party who adds insight you didn’t have before, or something reveals itself and you start getting more clues, more clarity.

For us this weekend, it was a combination of all of it: letting ourselves feel our feelings, getting into prayer to see more clearly, finding more peace, and then through conversation and a little more of that bird’s-eye view, seeing the many ways this could have been protection or redirection.

I think of the year and a half I spent house-hunting before I found the first house I actually wanted to bid on, and then losing it, even though we said we’d match any offer, because it turned out there was a personal relationship between the seller’s agent and the other buyer.

I had to feel my feelings, be upset and frustrated.

But it taught me that I would know, I would feel it, when I was in a house I could actually live in, after a year of never feeling that excited about anything. And when we did find our home, we actually got to negotiate the price down. Now I think, oh my God, thank God we didn’t win that first house, because ours is so much nicer in every way. Sometimes it helps to remember other times like that, times you wanted something so badly, did all the right earthly things, and it still didn’t happen, only to look back later and realize you were divinely blocked from something so you could find what was actually meant for you.

So, if you’re going after big things right now — big manifestations, big expansion, whether it’s a home, a job, a relationship, a move, whatever it is — there are going to be stumbles along the path.

Some of them are redirecting you toward what’s actually in your highest alignment.

Some are just reminding you what you truly desire, so you stay on the right path or get back on it.

These are not moments to lose faith. They’re moments to lean on it, especially when we feel blindsided, betrayed, or brokenhearted by whatever the world just handed us.

For my paid subscribers, aka ‘my entourage’, just thought of that lingo this week because it feels so much more fun than subscriber! For actors, your entourage members are your near and dearest, they are your ride or die, the people who likely knew you before you were anything to clap for as well as the real ones you met along the way. So that’s what I’d like to think those of you pay a little each month to get the behind-the-scenes nitty gritty scoop are to me! ;)

So behind the paywall you’ll find this week’s ‘voice memo’ about :

• where I’m at in my manifesting journey during the lions gate

• why I’m taking a pause on some specific goals for this eclipse season and just focusing on overall magnetism

• my current spiritual practices and an ah-ha I had yesterday using them

• as well as the specific 40-day meditation practice I’ve just embarked on with a close friend of mine as well as an invitation to join us

P.S. We are also opening up the paid subscriber chat so that those of you in the entourage can both receive little notes from me but also ask me questions and connect with each other as well! Say hi and introduce yourself!