Don’t Expect Fireworks

When you're on the cusp of a major change or a period of transition, it can be deeply unnerving, if not outright terrifying. Other times, it can feel like trudging through sludge, as though you’re making no progress no matter how hard you try. Or like in my case, it can feel like nothing at all. Just another day. A profound stillness before something irrevocably shifts in your life.

That’s where I feel like I am right now.

For about a year, I’ve had a gut feeling that massive change was coming, and I reacted the way one might on a rollercoaster right before the stomach-turning plummet. But then for months, nothing happened. Life went on. I continued floundering and working toward a future I couldn’t yet see but could feel barreling toward me all the same.

And now, after reaching a major milestone—publishing and promoting my website and receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback on my work, something I wouldn’t have believed only a few months ago—I only feel the stillness.

Not empty stillness. Something resembling peace.

So unaccustomed to this strange new sensation—usually preferring to thrash around in unbridled chaos—this feeling of complete stillness would normally disturb me. But it doesn’t. It’s just…underwhelming.

I don’t know what I was expecting. Fireworks, maybe? A phone call from every publisher across the country desperately trying to sign a contract with me? That’s not exactly what happened. I published my website—months, if not years, of hard work—and then I went about my day.

It didn’t feel different in any meaningful way. It didn’t feel like a momentous occasion. Nothing like the victorious culmination of countless hours of devotion.

It’s made me think about the nature of change. Television would have us believe that when you pursue your dreams and your passions, when you embark on a journey of self-discovery, there’s some massive event that flips your world upside down, something undeniable, as though once you reach some arbitrary milestone, God almighty reaches His hand down to pluck you out of the old and dump you unceremoniously into your new reality.

But I don’t think it’s like that.

I think change is something you recognize in retrospect. When you glance in the rearview mirror and realize your old life—the old you—is slowly receding into the horizon. And only then do you realize how far you’ve come.

I like to think that one day I’ll be sitting in my garden, relishing the warmth of the sun against my skin, savoring the perfume of wildflowers carried on a gentle breeze, and I’ll look up at a pale blue sky and realize that the life I prayed for on countless nights—the vision I clung to when life didn’t seem worth living, the one I worked toward diligently every single day—is the life I’m living.

Change isn’t always a right hook to the throat. Sometimes it’s an unseen hand holding yours as you step tentatively into uncertainty, knowing that should you stumble, should you fall, 

that hand will catch you.

*Blog posts will be added every Sunday starting next weekend!