Photo by Henry & Co. on Pexels
Hey there everyone —
Take a moment to remember: when’s the last time you took a leap? What happened?
There was a time in my life when I knew I had to leap; I knew it was coming, but I had no idea how to do it. I had this image in my mind that kept coming up: me, sitting on a ledge (weirdly, the “ledge” was the mantle of a fireplace, don’t ask me why) and the wall was pushing forward, getting closer and closer to my back. One day, there wasn’t going to be any room left and I was going to fall off the ledge.
I did fall; I did leap.
It sucked. For a long time. I was in freefall. I was lonely. I had days and days where the only creatures I spoke to were birds. Some days the only person who spoke to me was the person checking out my groceries. I’d make eye contact, hoping my hunger didn’t shine too intensely from my eyes. I’d count how many hours it had been since I’d said anything out loud.
One of the things about leaps is if they work out, you get to tell the story of all your failures and terrors and catastrophes from the point of view of your success. Leaps look great when they’re in the rearview mirror.
Looking backward, the leap looks volitional. Like, sure you didn’t know what was going to happen, but you must have planned at least part of it? Isn’t there some power in deciding to do something brave and then going for it?
It reminds me of that slogan: leap
and the net will appear.
I bristle when I hear that phrase. I know it’s about faith. It’s about an abundance worldview instead of scarcity and threat. It’s about trusting there’s a benevolent universe. That amazing things can happen without prior planning. That you can’t always be in control. That serendipity and surprise and community are in play. We aren’t alone. We aren’t solo actors. We’re connected, interdependent, and if we could only trust that, just think how much more creativity and joy and beauty could be blooming, all around us?
What’s not to like about that?
A few things. For one, that’s likely the perspective of the person on the other side of the leap. It’s what they discovered after things worked out.
For another, that slogan seems like wish fulfillment. A bright headfake away from how hard it is to risk, to go after something tough. It has a flavor of privilege to it. Who can leap and a net will appear? What’s that net made of? Money? Whiteness? Educational attainment? A network of connections? Who’s holding that net? Are they smiling? Is anyone standing nearby with a knife?
Does it still count as a leap if the choice wasn’t ours—if other circumstances, other people, changed our lives, suddenly and all at once?
One thing I have learned about leaps is they often destroy our coping in the process. Either our old coping skills no longer work for us and we’re thrown into a kind of collapse, or what we need for the place we’re going isn’t here yet.
It’s like recovery. A person becomes sober and no longer has access to the substance or behavior that soothed them. They are plunged into a void. They’ve dropped the old coping mechanism and they have to sit there, shivering and defenseless, for as long as it takes to develop the new skills that will hold them up.
The point at which they most need to feel safe and held and protected, they must instead tolerate exposure and unknowing, the contempt and judgment of those they left behind; the stretchy quality of empty days, the complete loss of structure and routine. It can bring you to the brink of madness. You still have to get up the next day, and do it again.
When I think about leaps now I have a different image in my mind. Instead of that fireplace mantle, I picture darkness. Not night sky darkness. Darkness like Black Hole dark. The void. I picture a light moving, tracing a looping pattern across its face. Falling, looping up to a blazing point, falling again. Over and over. That’s the image I hold in my mind when I know I have to change, and I can’t know what’s coming. My old coping mechanisms won’t work. I’m going to fall down into the empty space. I’ll test the new one, rise up, see if it can hold. I’ll fall, again. Only it’s not me. It’s this pattern in my mind. It has an energy of its own and I’m riding it.
If you’re in freefall; if you feel helpless and alone and afraid, I hope you’ll hold that pattern in your mind. Know that you’re at once deeply alone and also moving through an underworld that others have traversed. When I fell off that ledge, I didn’t even know the word coping mechanism, let alone what one was. I didn’t know that when I was a kid I figured out some ways to survive and as an adult I was still trying to survive in the same way, and that couldn’t work. I just felt shame. I told myself every day that I should have known better, should have already figured out what to do, and my job was to hide my bewilderment from everyone else, as long as I could. It never occurred to me to ask for help. I didn’t believe anyone else would understand my experience. I couldn’t bear the asking, the burden, the need, piled on top of everything else.
I spent way too long in that place. Or, maybe I needed to spend that long there. I’ll never know. Maybe that’s what it took for me to see—not a net, appearing from nowhere to cradle me, but rather that my life was like a wheat field after the farmer burnt last year’s stalks to the ground. I could sit in the smoke and feel the fallow ground. Wait for something to grow.
Stay safe out there this week —
xoxo
Rebecca
Thank you for this, Rebecca. So beautiful.