The Pause Before the Plunge

There are moments in life when the body and mind seem to align, not in elation but in clarity. For me, this moment has arrived quietly and unexpectedly, after years of dissonance and disorder. It feels, strangely, like medicine. It feels like a medicine forged through endurance, the kind that takes shape only after surviving what strips everything else away. This healing is quiet and cellular, formed slowly in the aftermath of what nearly destroyed me. My nervous system, once calibrated for chaos, has begun to recognize stillness not as a threat but as a reprieve. And in that reprieve, I find myself suspended in what feels like a pause. A breath held long enough to ask: what now?

Returning from travel to a city fractured by natural disaster, surrounded by others walking through their own rubble, both literal and metaphorical, I am struck by a dissonance between the vitality I felt in motion and the fragility I sense upon return. I’m aware of the lives intertwined with my own, of the collective grief we share, of the uncertainty still vibrating beneath our feet. But more than that, I’m aware of myself, of how I carry my own foundations, cracked though they may be. And this awareness, though valuable, is heavy.

There is a temptation to rush forward. Historically, I have done just that. I rode the high of momentum, threw myself into advocacy, performance, productivity. These bursts of passion often masqueraded as healing but were, in truth, accelerants. I mistook movement for meaning. Joy became urgency. Stillness felt like failure. I didn’t yet understand that caution could be a form of self-preservation, or that restraint could be a symptom of wisdom.

Now, I hesitate. Not from fear, but from experience. I have lived through the consequences of what happens when I don’t. Illness, both physical and mental, has stalked my life like a shadow. I moved through years with urgency, building identities out of necessity, trying to make meaning from the mess.

And yet, for all the struggle, I look at who I am now with something close to reverence. I no longer need to define myself by achievement or advocacy. I no longer seek validation through public recognition. What I once pursued for ego, I now interrogate for intention.

Is my work an extension of who I truly am, or who I believed I needed to be in order to matter?

This is the reckoning I now find myself in. I feel myself circling back to a version of me I lost along the way. The awkward, intuitive, observant child who studied people to understand where she fit. The girl who learned to perform confidence before she ever felt it. That child still lives in me. So does the woman who endured hospitals, poverty, stigma, and silence. But now, I meet them both with compassion. I do not wish to erase who I’ve been. I only wish to stop pretending.

Much of my past was an improvisation. Becoming what was needed to survive, shapeshifting for acceptance, suppressing for peace. But now I no longer want to numb or narrate my way out of the present. I want to live in it. I want to feel what I feel without questioning its worth. I want to find joy that is slow and simple, not dramatic or public. I want to create not to be seen, but because something inside me asks to be expressed.

I know the world is angry. I see the fractures between people, the hostility in discourse, the weight of grief and injustice. I carry that awareness too. But I have learned that I cannot heal others by hollowing out myself. Perhaps the most radical thing I can do now is rest. Is breathe. Is be.

In this season of reflection, I don’t seek answers so much as I seek honesty. I don’t know if what I do will change the world. I don’t know if that is even the goal anymore. What I do know is that the person I am becoming is not an invention. She is a remembering. And for the first time in a long time, I trust her.