The Gift of Letting the Pieces Fall
My whole life I’ve carried a weight with me. A secret disappointment I’ve held in myself for over 30 years: I’m a quitter. I eventually quit all of the things, maybe it was a sport, a job, a hobby, or even a relationship.
The other day, for the first time, I realized that this part of my story isn’t actually negative. The ‘weight’ I thought I was carrying around wasn’t actually holding me back or weighing me down, it was something propelling me forward. I’m not a quitter, I’m a starter-over. I don’t walk away because I failed at whatever I was trying to accomplish, I instead realized that my life is more important than the ‘thing’ and it’s time to re-route.
Throughout my life people have always told me that I have been brave in my decision making. In my head, I dismissed what they said and instead told myself that I quit. But I was fucking brave. I wasn’t scared to let all of the pieces fall. And when I’m being honest, I love to let all of the pieces fall. One of my favorite feelings in life is after I shake the snowglobe of my life and everything is forced to find a new place, allowing for my next step to literally be anything.
When I left my job and my entire life in New York City, I didn’t know what to expect. I bought a car, filled it with everything I owned, and drove out to Colorado. I was leaving a city of millions to move to a mountain town of 250 residents. Everything was about to be different, unfamiliar, including who I was in the world. Some see this as a scary place to be, but for me, I have never felt more free. Getting in that car was the first time I was in the driver's seat of a car in 5 years, yet for the first time in five years, I didn’t feel the need to control every move. I instead left room for the magic of the unknown, for the script I couldn’t write, and for life to take me on a new path. To me, this is one of the most exhilarating feelings life holds.
It has been in moments like leaving the city that I have felt the most alive, the most excited, and the most myself. I didn’t stay in something because I was expected to, I left because I wanted something more, whether or not I could define what the outcome could be. The truth is, the outcome didn’t matter, because in these moments my life became a little bit more mine, and when your life is yours, and you are you, you can’t lose.
