I stood at the edge of the park yesterday, watching a woman throw a tennis ball for her dog. Over and over. The dog would sprint, grab the ball, bring it back. Simple. Joyful. Repetitive. And I thought: When was the last time I felt that kind of uncomplicated aliveness?
I couldn’t remember.
So I kept walking. And the question followed me like a shadow I’d been ignoring for years.
Five years.
That’s how long it’s been since I can say I was truly awake in my own life. I don’t mean I was asleep; I was very much doing things. Working. Showing up. Surviving. But there’s a difference between living and being alive, and I think I’ve spent half a decade confusing the two.
Yesterday, on that walk, it hit me all at once: I’ve been living under a rock.
Not metaphorically in some poetic, Instagram-caption kind of way. I mean it literally felt like I had crawled under something heavy and dark five years ago and just... stayed there. Safe. Hidden. Numb. I built a life that required less of me. I said yes to things that didn’t scare me and no to things that did. I stopped asking the big questions because I was afraid of the answers.
Under the rock, I was safe. But I was also alone. And I didn’t even notice until yesterday.
As the realization settled in, a quote I’d read once surfaced in my mind, hitting me with the force of a physical blow:
“The cost of your new life is your old one.”
I realized that for five years, I had been paying for “safety” with the currency of my own soul. I was so busy protecting myself from potential pain that I had accidentally protected myself from potential joy, too.
There’s a specific kind of grief that comes with this. It’s the grief of looking back and realizing you were a passenger in your own skin. I cried on that walk—the kind of crying where you have to sit down on a bench because your legs won’t hold you anymore.
But through the tears, a new, sharper thought began to emerge. It wasn’t just about what I had lost; it was about what I was currently choosing.
I realized that the rock wasn’t just something that happened to me. At some point, I started holding it up. I was the one maintaining the shadows. And if I was the one holding it up, I was the only one who could let it go.
I thought of Mary Oliver’s haunting question:
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
For the last five years, my answer had been: “I plan to keep it safe.”
What a waste of a wild life.
The most terrifying part of that walk wasn’t the grief. It was the sudden, cold clarity that I need to change.
Not because my boss needs me to be more “on.” Not because my friends want the “old me” back. Not to satisfy an algorithm or a social expectation.
I need to do it for me.
I have spent so much time being a version of myself that was “manageable” for other people—the reliable one, the quiet one, the one who doesn’t make waves—that I forgot I am the only person who has to live inside this head until the very end.
If I don’t step out now, I am essentially choosing to spend the rest of my time on earth in a waiting room for a life that will never start.
I realized that:
“You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.” — Rumi
I had been pretending to be a puddle. I had been shrinking my ocean to fit under a rock because the vastness of my own potential terrified me. I was afraid that if I really lived—if I really wanted things—I might fail. But staying under the rock is the only guaranteed failure there is.
I don’t have a ten-step plan. I don’t have a “New Me” starter kit. I’m still on the walk, metaphorically speaking.
But the edit has begun. It started the moment I looked at that rock and said, “I’m done with the shade.”
It’s going to be uncomfortable. The light is going to be too bright for a while. I’m going to feel exposed and clumsy and probably a little bit broken. But I would rather be a mess in the sun than a masterpiece in the dark.
I am doing this for the version of me who still remembers how to sprint for the ball. I am doing this for the version of me who deserves to feel the wind.
I am stepping out. Not for the world to see me, but so that I can finally see the world.
And for the first time in five years, that feels like enough.