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He helped me remember that anxiety was a natural part of doing something new and big.
I believe that each of us carries a bit of inner brightness, something entirely unique and individual, a flame that’s worth protecting. When we are able to recognize our own light, we become empowered to use it. When we learn to foster what’s unique in the people around us, we become better able to build compassionate communities and make meaningful change.
I’ve learned it’s okay to recognize that self-worth comes wrapped in vulnerability, and that what we share as humans on this earth is the impulse to strive for better, always and no matter what. We become bolder in brightness.
If you know your light, you know yourself. You know your own story in an honest way. In my experience, this type of self-knowledge builds confidence, which in turn breeds calmness and an ability to maintain perspective, which leads, finally, to being able to connect meaningfully with others—and this to me is the bedrock of all things.
We ourselves are always in motion, in progress. We are perpetually in flux. We keep learning even when we’re tired of learning, changing even when we’re exhausted by change. There are few guaranteed outcomes. Each day we are tasked with becoming some newer version of ourselves.
I can see now that this is exactly what big storms do: They breach our boundaries and burst our pipes. They tear down structures and flood our normal routes and pathways. They strip away the signposts and leave us in a changed landscape, changed ourselves, with no choice but to find a new way forward. I recognize this now, but for a time there, all I could see was the storm.
I’ve come to understand that sometimes the big stuff becomes easier to handle when you deliberately put something small alongside it. When everything starts to feel big and therefore scary and insurmountable, when I hit a point of feeling or thinking or seeing too much, I’ve learned to make the choice to go toward the small.
Any time your circumstances start to feel all-consuming, I suggest you try going in the other direction—toward the small. Look for something that’ll help rearrange your thoughts, a pocket of contentedness where you can live for a while. And by this I don’t mean sitting passively in front of your television or scrolling through your phone. Find something that’s active, something that asks for your mind but uses your body as well. Immerse yourself in a process. And forgive yourself for temporarily ducking out of the storm.
Maybe, like me, you are hard on yourself. Maybe you see every problem as urgent. Maybe you want to do big things with your life, to drive yourself forward with a bold agenda, not wasting a single second of time. That’s all good, and you are not wrong to want to go for big things. But once in a while, you’ll want to allow yourself the pleasure of a small feat. You’re going to need to step back and rest your brain from all the hard problems and wearying thoughts. Because the hard problems and wearying thoughts will always be there, largely unfinished and mostly unfixed. The holes will always be
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When you want to make a difference, when you want to change the world, your mental health will sometimes get in the way. And that’s because it’s supposed to. Health is built on balance. Balance is built on health. We need to tend carefully and sometimes vigilantly to our mental health.
Your mind is constantly and imperfectly working the levers, trying to keep you steady as you figure out what to do with your passion, ambition, and big dreams, as well as your hurts, limitations, and fears. It may tap the brakes and try to slow you down a little sometimes. It may throw up distress signals when it senses a problem—if you’re trying to move too fast or working in a way that’s unsustainable, or if you’re getting caught up in disordered thinking or harmful patterns of behavior. Pay attention to how you’re feeling.
In trying to spare yourself the worry and discomfort of taking a risk, you’re potentially costing yourself an opportunity. In clinging only to what you know, you are making your world small. You are robbing yourself of chances to grow.
He never told me to get over my fear, nor did he dismiss it as irrational or dumb. He just used solid information as a means of unbundling the threat and giving me tools to stay safe.
competence, I’ve learned, is what sits on the flip side of fear.
But what my parents showed us was how to parse that alertness thoughtfully—to break down the mechanics of what scared us, to help figure out when fear was serving us and when it was holding us back.
My parents nudged my brother and me forward into competence, creating opportunities for us to feel a sense of certainty and mastery each time we conquered something new. I think as they saw it, competence was a form of safety; knowing how to step forward despite our nerves was protection in and of itself. Their job was to show us it was possible.
because she had faith in me, I had faith in me, too. As scared as I was, I felt a sense of pride and independence, which became important building blocks in my foundation as an independent human being.
Because what my mother showed me is that if you try to keep your children from feeling fear, you’re essentially keeping them from feeling competence, too. Go forth with a spoonful of fear and return with a wagonful of competence.
This is another thing to recognize: Doubt comes from within. Your fearful mind is almost always trying to seize the steering wheel and change your course. Its whole function is to rehearse catastrophe, scare you out of opportunity, and throw rocks at your dreams. It enjoys having you flooded and doubtful. Because then you’re more likely to stay home on your couch, nice and passive, taking no risks at all. Which means that defying your fear almost always involves defying a part of yourself. To me, this is a vital aspect of the decoding: You have to learn how to identify and then tame something
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understood in that moment that he was being presented with a larger choice about what to do with his fear. “I realized I could either fall underneath it, or stand on top of it,” he said. “And that’s how I think of nerves. They’re a fuel source….You can get on top of them and it can power the ship, or don’t get on top of them, and they blow up your ship.”
she’s got real estate in my head. In fact, I’ve granted her full citizenship, if only because this makes her easier to name and thus to decode. Rather than pretending she doesn’t exist or constantly trying to defeat her, I’ve gotten to know my fearful mind as well as she knows me. And this alone has loosened her hold and lessened her stealth. I’m not so easily ambushed when the jolts arrive. To me, my fearful mind is noisy but generally ineffectual—more thunder than lightning—and that’s taken the teeth right out of her agenda.
But what he sees first, what he chooses to recognize, is a whole person, someone he’s genuinely glad to see. Unlike a lot of us, Ron has figured out that self-loathing is hardly a good starting block from which to launch a new day.
Many of us spend a lifetime registering the presence of critical faces around us, feeling bombarded by judgment, asking ourselves what we’re getting wrong, and internalizing the answers in harmful ways that stay with us for life. All too often, we turn the critical gaze directly on ourselves. We punish ourselves with what’s wrong before ever having the chance to even glimpse what’s right.
She had learned to put her gladness out front and up first, not just with her kids but with all kids. Like Ron, she made a point of starting kind.
In life, it’s hard to dream about what’s not visible. When you look around and can’t find any version of yourself out there in the wider world, when you scan the horizon and see nobody like you, you start to feel a broader loneliness, a sense of being mismatched to your own hopes, your own plans, your own strengths. You begin to wonder where—and how—you will ever belong.
“No one can make you feel bad if you feel good about yourself.”
But he’d also seen, in his father—my grandfather Dandy—how fear created limits, the toll bitterness could take. And so my dad went the other way. He allowed none of it into his soul. He made a point of not holding on to pain or embarrassment, knowing that it wasn’t likely to serve him, recognizing that there was a certain power in being able to shake things off, in letting certain moments go. He understood the unfairness was there, but he refused to be brought down by it, recognizing that much of it was not in his control.
I had to first find my own footing, my own solid pride. I learned not to hide who I was, but to own it. I could not get defeated early or start avoiding situations that might be easier to avoid. I had to become more comfortably afraid. Unless I was going to quit, I had to keep going. My dad’s life provided an object lesson in this as well: You take what you have and you march it forward. You find your tools, adapt as needed, and carry on. You persevere, understanding that there are plenty of despites.
It takes work to get yourself out of other people’s mirrors. It takes practice to keep the right messages in your head.
It’s also helpful to acknowledge what makes this work so difficult. We are tasked with trying to write our own script over layers and layers of already-written ones. We have to try to put our truth over narratives that have long suggested we don’t fit, don’t belong, or don’t register at all.
Discomfort is a teacher. Lack of reward is a teacher. Dealing with these things gives us practice at life, helping us figure out who we are when we’re a little pushed. When that tool is missing from your toolbox, it gets harder to navigate the adult world and the intricate dance of friendship.
We saw openness as the better choice.
These are the friends I’ve asked to pull up a chair and sit with me in life.
Life has shown me that strong friendships are most often the result of strong intentions. Your table needs to be deliberately built, deliberately populated, and deliberately tended to.
We only hurt ourselves when we hide our realness away.
With him, there would be none of the standard cat-and-mouse romantic gamesmanship. He was uninterested in playing around. Instead, he took the guesswork right out of it. He put his feelings on the table and left them there, as if to say, Here’s my interest. Here’s my respect. This is my starting point. We can only go forward from here.
we would survive the gaps, so long as we stayed conscious of them.
She tells me that it’s important to always presume the best about children—that it’s preferable to let them live up to your expectations and high regard rather than asking them to live down to your doubts and worries. My mom says that you should grant kids your trust rather than making them earn it. This is her version of “starting kind.”
her plan was to become as unnecessary in our lives as possible, as quickly as possible.
“I’m not raising babies,” she used to say. “I am raising adults.”
We did a fair amount of this stuff imperfectly, but the point was we were doing it. Nobody was doing it for us. My mother wasn’t stepping in. She didn’t correct our errors or squelch our way of doing things, even if our way was slightly different from hers. This, I believe, was my first taste of power. I liked being trusted to get something done. “It’s easier for kids to make mistakes when they’re little,” my mom told me recently when I asked her about this. “Let them make them. And then you can’t make too big a deal out of it, either. Because if you do, they’ll stop trying.”
Once, when I was in high school and unhappy about having to deal with a math teacher who struck me as arrogant, my mom heard my complaint, nodded understandingly, and then shrugged. “You don’t have to like your teacher, and she doesn’t have to like you,” she said. “But she’s got math in her head that you need in yours, so maybe you should just go to school and get the math.” She looked at me then and smiled, as if this should be the simplest thing in the world to grasp. “You can come home to be liked,” she said. “We will always like you here.”
You can spend a lot of time dreaming, preparing, and planning for family life to go perfectly, but in the end, you’re pretty much just left to deal with whatever happens.
“You really have to crown yourself with the belief that what I’m about and what I’m here for is way beyond this moment. I’m learning that I am not lightning that strikes once. I am the hurricane that comes every single year, and you can expect to see me again soon.”
But when you do the work, you own the skills. They can’t be lost or taken away. They are yours to keep and use forever. That’s what I hope you’ll most remember.
All I can do is try to draw closer to your uniqueness, to feel linked by the small overlaps between us. This is how empathy works. It’s how differentness starts to weave itself into togetherness. Empathy fills the gaps between us, but never closes them entirely. We get pulled into the lives of others by virtue of what they feel safe and able to show us, and the generosity with which we are able to meet them. Piece by piece, person by person, we begin to apprehend the world in more fullness.
What I’ve learned is that you don’t easily lose your sense of being an outsider, even when you make it inside. There’s a tension that stays with you, clinging like a fog. You can’t help but wonder sometimes: When will this get less hard?
I understood that you don’t just go barreling into a new position and expect the role to suit you perfectly. You have to do your research, sit back a little, and think strategically as you learn and adapt to the new job. You have to toe the line, in other words, before you can even begin to think about trying to redraw it.
to remind ourselves to hang on to our integrity when we saw others losing theirs.
Going high is like drawing a line in the sand, a boundary we can make visible and then take a moment to consider. Which side of this do I want to be on? It’s a reminder to pause and be thoughtful, a call to respond with both your heart and your head. Going high is always a test, as I see it.
