where I end and begin again

Sep 11

Dear Reader,

The stories we tell about ourselves are powerful.

Some stories we inherit,
some are given to us,
and others we write ourselves without realizing we’re doing it.

These stories help us make sense of where we’ve been and why we are the way we are. But over time, even the truest stories can become too small and limiting.

You can feel it when a story no longer fits, though it can take time to admit it.

For some, it’s the story of being the reliable one: the person others can lean on, the one who keeps things together. That story may have carried you through many seasons, and there is truth in it, but over time it begins to demand more than it gives. For others, it’s the narrative of not being enough. It runs like a thread through memory, so familiar it’s hard to imagine yourself without it. And yet it, too, begins to limit the ways you can see your own life.

When you are trying to find the new, part of you will want to cling to the old script, if only because it feels familiar. Even a limiting story can feel safer than standing in the uncertainty of what might come next.

To begin again is to live, for a time, without certainty. It is to step into a space where the next story hasn’t yet revealed itself. This can feel like loss, but it is also the raw material of becoming. In that unfinished space, new questions start to form: What else could be true about me? What else could my life hold? What does it mean to end, and to begin again?

Yours in the journey,