What I know is this: transformation has stages. There is the standing at the edge of the cliff, filled with a sort of lusty anticipation. Everything behind me is known, too familiar, too small…Everything before me? Unknown…
What if I leap?
Of course, once you do leap, there are certain things that are helpful and certain things that are not. Looking back, not helpful. Looking down, also…not.
Looking in, helpful. Looking around, at where we are now and who is with us, very helpful. I know this, because 12 years ago I felt the intoxicant of creating a story that is mine and no one else’s enter my bloodstream. I began working with stories, living them as I was writing them. And I became the woman that I am today, by which I mean authoring my fate by stepping the edge of what I think is possible and thinking Is this really possible? Can I get away with this? And finding that it is, and I can, and doing it, and finding a new edge, and repeat.
And here I am, in another period of transformation. I am falling again, and all around me, old lies about who I can be and cannot be are falling away as well. I can tell because those lies are almost always accompanied by another kind of story, one that traps instead of transforms: the villain story. “I can’t… because he…” “I can’t … because she…”
Those villain stories tend to be invisible cages that we build for ourselves, maintain, protect. They have been for me, at least. But there is something about leaping that breaks villain stories. Those cages turn into sticks twisting in the air, as undone by the pull of the unknown as all the other familiar, old things that kept me small.
After 12 years of working this intentionally, it still feels like falling sometimes. But not always. Sometimes, it feels like freedom. sometimes it feels like I'm having the time of my life. Sometimes I remember this: what is behind is not alive, what is before, beckons. I am not falling, I am flying. And there is a mouse running under the snow.