It Feels Like This. Until I Tell Myself It Doesn't.

It's the split of knowing in your bones you are meant for something else. But, on the other side, the feel of the routine - feet pounding the downtown pavement in secure, happily paid steps. The fear, then, comes in and it's weighty. It's one of wondering if what you were meant for was to be the person in the office that was meant for other things. That you're too late to leap now. That foolishness would have been rewarded before. But by now, you've shown the world you don't believe in yourself enough.

There is a grace some of them have. As though they've cast off the insecure weight. It isn't that they don't have their own anvils, albatrosses, gravity shoes, or their own metaphors to bear. But there is a carefree air to one who stands tall in saying, "I HAVE A RIGHT TO PERFORM AND WRITE AND MAKE IT MY JOB." It's beautiful to behold. I long for it. This isn't about the huge percentage of that proclamation that is out of your control. This is about owning the ask, claiming the fight to be heard and seen as a worthwhile one.

Others see you differently. Kinder than you see yourself. But just as you begin to allow that kind view in -- that OF COURSE you can do this -- you tell yourself that's complacency and laziness. That multitudes more deserving and talented and experienced aren't achieving what you're trying. So let it go. But you can't. You can't fucking let it go. It's always there.

And so.

The process starts all over again, while your feet pound the downtown pavement, a little sadder, a little more defeated. Until those steps are no longer guaranteed to bring security. Until that magnet is being ripped out from your shoes. The split you've hidden for so long is now massive, a rip through your cool facade. It bleeds into everything. It's messy.

Because you are being called up.

It's now or never and not believing in your own ability to make the leap is a sure way to fall on your face. The weight, the doubt, the fear, it has to go. It's chaining you to the ground and you'll never feel the air, the grace of claiming your worth, if you don't shed it now. What good does it do to carry it now? None at all. All to gain.

Leap. But...the doubt...but...the leap...but the fear...but...the leap...

Don't Click That. Too Late.

It was a distressing headline, because that's what headlines are supposed to be - distressing or shocking so you'll read the story. It appeared in my feed as "trending" and something I might be interested in. Apparently, I was interested. I clicked on the damn thing.

Moments before, I was telling the world about a friend's new cafe. It had just opened after years of hard work and we finally got the chance to try it today. I was happily typing about Nutella-filled doughnuts and panini and coffee. Since this week has been a nonstop train of Refugee Refusal Arguments, Toddlers Sleeping Outdoors Pictures, Racist Idiots In Charge Stories and the Painfully Obvious Absence of My Beautifully Kind Mother-In-Law Since Her Death Last Week, I figured an innocuous food post would do me good.

It did. Until I clicked. Until I wondered, "Well, this sounds horrible. I wonder what happened?" As the story loaded, I yelled at myself, alone in our apartment.

"Do NOT READ that."

And I yelled to the universe as I read it.

"No. NO. NO NO NO."

And I cried and my breathing sped up. My legs wouldn't stop bobbing up and down, to match the pace of my heartbeat.

I know we all do it. We click on horrific things because we're terrified the story inside could happen to us or someone we love. If it is about children, we are instantly more terrified. If it is children hurting children, our terror becomes bewildered sadness. But we read it. Because it happens.

I am not a proponent of burying my head in the sand. I speak out often and write about what I see and the changes I want in my life and the world. I act on them. I speak my mind. However, there is a limit. There is a threshold we reach, collectively. The world reached it when a picture of a small child washed ashore made its way to a newspaper, spurning reactions to the Refugee Crisis that were previously no more than uninterested shrugs of indifference or lack of education on the topic. We reach it with family, with friends, with information. We get full. The threshold for witnessing human suffering and cruelty seems to vary depending on the distance from ourselves. When it is a specific story, one that details someone's hurt and struggle - especially if that person is under two years old - the distance closes. It could be anyone we love. Predispositions and prejudices disappear, as there is nothing a 19 month old could have done to deserve suffering, just as there is nothing two three-year-olds could have done to inflict it with a sense of truly knowing what they had done. But it happened.

And I reached my threshold.

I don't want my head in the sand to the world, as I want to actively participate in making it a better place. However, I also don't want to shatter myself because an algorithm told me I would find something heartbreaking "interesting" for the next five minutes.

So we put our heads, then, in what?  A bubble, enabling us to see? In a window high in the air so we can breathe? I don't know.

I post here so infrequently because I doubt my own ability to write well enough to intrigue people to read it on an ongoing basis. But it cannot be about approval anymore. It's about where I have to put my head. I have to put it to thought and writing creatively, or I will forever live at this threshold. That isn't a sustainable place to stay.