The Space Between

There is a space between who I am and who I want to be, and for years I have tried to furnish it with stories. Excuses arranged like temporary furniture. Self deception dressed up as patience. Blame placed carefully on weather, timing, circumstance, other people, old wounds. I tell myself I am capable. I tell myself I have vision, discipline, hunger. I narrate a future version of me who finally arrives once things settle, once the chaos thins, once the next internal storm passes.

But the truth is quieter and harder to admit. I stay orbiting the same struggles. I circle familiar ground and call it progress. I reinforce the very walls I swear I want to break.

I know what blocks me. That is not the mystery. I can map my patterns with almost surgical clarity. The rush of inspiration that feels like transformation. The sudden devotion to plans that glow for a few days. Then the slow drift. The long pauses. The careful avoidance disguised as preparation. Fear slips on the costume of perfectionism and tells me not yet, not ready, not safe.

I overextend myself into other people’s lives while abandoning my own. I fill calendars and conversations and projects until I feel important, until I feel busy, until I can pretend movement is happening. Inside, the real work waits. Untouched. Watching.

The most dangerous thing I do, though, is not procrastination. It is how I speak to myself when no one is listening.

I emotionally bruise myself in ways I would never allow toward another person. I pick at my perceived failures like a wound that wants to stay open. I narrate my missteps as character flaws. I tell myself unfinished means unworthy. I tell myself hesitation is evidence. I tell myself struggle is proof that something inside me is defective.

And then I live inside that story.

This kind of harm is quiet. It sounds intelligent. It borrows the language of self awareness and calls itself honesty. It pretends to be discipline. It pretends to be accountability. But it is not clarity. It is fear rehearsing control.

Fear wants me frozen.
Fear wants me perfect before I am moving.
Fear wants me punished before I am allowed progress.

But I am not a sum of my failures. I am not a ledger of what stalled or slipped or stayed unfinished. My trauma is not a hall pass for stagnation, but neither is it a sentence. It is simply weight I carry while walking forward.

Knowing is not enough. Insight is not movement. Awareness without action becomes another place to hide.

So the real question is not who I could become. It is what I am willing to practice becoming.

Will I keep waiting for a version of life that feels safe enough to enter?
Will I keep calling readiness a future event?
Will I keep letting self cruelty pretend it is motivation?

Or will I step into the uncomfortable work of aligning what I say with what I do. Not heroically. Not dramatically. Just honestly. Repeatedly. Without spectacle.

I want to believe I am ready, but belief is passive. It sits still. Action changes the air.

So this is my first quiet act of accountability. I stop defining myself by intention. I stop narrating potential. I stop auditioning for a life instead of living one.

I will measure myself by movement, not by promises.
By practice, not by fantasy.
By what I touch, begin, return to, and finish.

And I will not punish myself for the ground I have not yet crossed. I will place my foot down where I am and start from there.

Not perfect.
Not fearless.
Not finished.

Just willing.