For me, there are three landmark moments of a crisis, major event, or life-changing season. First, there’s the out-of-body moment you see the tsunami rolling towards you; the time after you are swept away by the brute force of the waves, fighting with all you have for each precious breath; and the moment it all ends, and you’ve yet to realize that you’ll never be the same.

We often stand back and look at the wreckage of our lives and immediately outline the rebuilding process. We work to remember where everything was, how to reach that familiarity of old, desperately grasping at any sense of normalcy. But, as I stand among the shambles of my latest disaster, I realize for the first time in my life. I don’t want to pick up these pieces.

I have spent my life scrambling to recreate emotional comfort – no matter how difficult or unreasonable. I have taken most primitive tools, splintered wood, and warped nails to build makeshift foundations to begin again. As a child, it seemed necessary to survive. But blow after blow, build after build, and it became a consuming proclivity – a tragic concession.

But I’ve no longer the desire to concede and can’t stomach the idea of the familiar. I. Am. Not. The. Same. And things that used to frighten me, those unknown things that my psyche failed to form into safe, logical options, lay at my sea-level horizon, luring me like sirens of old. I know how it feels to stay where I stand; I know how it feels to be unbending and stoic – to be alone. It’s all I know. But I don’t know how it feels to unwrap my heart from the soft folds of Linus’ blanket and hand it to another.

So, I’m dropping my sad little tools. Slowly and with great trepidation, I’m walking away from the false security of the broken and battered life I’ve fought to preserve. And I’m relinquishing my long-standing position as Captain of My Own Heart. There’s a strange shift in logic when fear of stagnation overtakes fear of the unknown. But again, I am not the same, which feels freeing and frightening all at the same time.

---

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

C.S. Lewis