I Don't Know What Happens Next, but I'm Doing It Anyway.

I'm writing this surrounded by boxes.

Not metaphorical boxes. Actual ones. Inventory to sell, things to sort, a life that is mid-pack and nowhere near done. I’m closing the business I built over 23 years. The place I've called home for the last 18 years is going on the market. And I, a woman in my late 50’s, am standing in the gap between a before and an after that doesn't exist yet.

This is not a success story. I'm not writing this from the other side. I'm writing it from the middle. 

One minute I'm excited. The next I'm terrified.

Not sequentially. Not in neat phases I can manage. Sometimes within the same hour.

I'll be packing something in a box and feel this sudden rush: oh my God, I'm actually doing this, the good kind of rush, the kind that makes you feel lit up and alive. And then I'll stop. And the what-ifs come.

What if we’ve made a terrible mistake? What if we can't make it work? What if we’re too old for this kind of leap? What if the certainty I feel today is just adrenaline and on the other side of all this there's just... chaos?

And here's the thing I've learned in the last few weeks of living inside this particular kind of uncertainty: Both are real. The excitement and the terror aren't contradicting each other. They're the same thing, wearing different clothes.

The what-ifs will eat you alive — if you let them pick the menu.

There are two kinds of what-ifs.

The catastrophic ones arrive loudest. What if it goes wrong. What if we fail. What if people were right to raise their eyebrows. These ones have very dramatic voices and they love an audience. But there's another kind. Quieter. Easily drowned out by their louder cousins.

What if this is exactly right and everything will be OK?

Same question. Same two words but a completely different universe.

I'm practising choosing which what-ifs I feed. I'm not always winning. But I'm practising.

Nobody tells you about the gap

We love a transformation story. Before and after. Struggle and triumph. The messy bit in the middle gets edited out because it's uncomfortable to look at and hard to make inspiring.

But the gap is where it actually happens.

The gap is where you find out who you are when the certainty is gone and the safety net is packed in a box and you're still choosing to move forward anyway. That's not a small thing. That's everything.

I'm in the gap right now. Stock to shift. A farm to sell. A future that exists so far only in my imagination and a handful of conversations about what could be. And I'm still here. Getting up every morning. Making decisions. Carrying boxes.

That's what courage looks like from the inside by the way. Not fearless. Not certain. Just still moving.

If you're standing at the edge of something

Maybe you haven't made the leap yet. Maybe you're doing the mental arithmetic for the hundredth time, running the what-ifs, waiting to feel ready.

Here's what I can tell you from the middle of mine:

Ready is a myth. Ready is what happens after, not before. You don't get ready and then jump. You jump and then, somewhere on the way down, you figure out how to fly.

The gap is terrifying. The gap is also where you come alive.

I'll let you know how it goes.

— Line, writing from the middle of it