I woke up today thinking about leaps of faith. Not the kind where you show up to your local house of worship to listen to someone in a distinctive garb tell you how to believe in the divine. That’s one kind of leaping, an important one, a kind that many of us grew up learning how to do. Because we often see this act of faith, both within our personal circles and the wider world, we intuitively know what it’s like to connect to something greater. Whether we continue down a particular spiritual path, change lanes, or exit the system entirely, there is comfort knowing that many others have tracked these trails before. We know that someone can show us the way.
No, I woke up today thinking about an oft-neglected kind of leaping – the one into the unknown.
It’s funny. I remember the moment I realized the unknown was terrifying for most people. Who could ever be afraid of immense possibility? Can’t they see what I see? Curious, I asked the people in my life how they engaged with the unknown and listened with a faint snobbishness as they told me how they filled the void with swirls of anxiety, dread, and a body-freezing sort of panic. I would shake my head. They just didn’t get it. The unknown was wonderful, mysterious, captivating. So, again and again, I ran headlong into the vast darkness. What’s out there? I need to know.
There were lots of good things about that fearlessness. The experiences I collected from knocking about and starting fires molded my empathetic instincts. But you, my far more well-adjusted reader, do not need me to tell you there are many, many downsides to running into inky blackness – danger, harm, death. But I’m Teflon; the fear slid off me. I lost myself a frightening number of times, but never learned my lesson because something, someone kept pulling me back to the surface. I was supposed to hear “STOP”, but I couldn’t shake the belief that I was meant for this, meant to find out what was beyond the line.
It wasn’t until a mental health crisis nuked my life that I finally felt the shadow side of the unknown. The thoughts that furiously churned, the reckless actions I took, the bridges I burned with despair finally carried me to a place I did not understand. A vacuum where there was no possibility of comprehension. As I sunk into an acceptance of my diagnosis, I realized while I’d thought I had been running into the unknown all my life, those many forays and resuscitations had only been the opening act.
When I returned to the real world, I found I was now too scared to do anything. I would spend days lying in bed, pinned by anxiety, choking in dread. I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t know what was out there. I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.
But you know, the crazy thing is there was something in me, something that would pull me out from the water from time to time. So dim, a suffocating flame, but sometimes, it would be strong enough to lift my head and swing my legs over my wooden bedframe. For a brief second, I would feel a shiver of strength as the vertebrae in my spine stacked. I’d sit there for a while, my head hung low, weeping over my weakness, but then I would remember I was sitting instead of lying prone and that, trifling as it was, was victory.
And as I sat like that and as time went on, I slowly became tired of the fear. I became tired of the clenched fist of the unknown. A quiet voice in the back of my head started telling me that I needed to jump. I needed to cross over this desolate terrain. I didn’t know what was on the other side, but I needed to jump.
I wish I could tell you that I listened to that voice the very first day I heard it. I really wish it was that easy. But it wasn’t. I fought that voice, and bitterly. I was afraid, so afraid, resentful. You got me here in the first place. How could I ever trust you again? But the voice was persistent, so freaking annoying. Had it forgotten how we’d gotten here in the first place? No, I would say, I’m not listening this time. I had packed up my life. I was done with the unknown. No. No. No. Yet, it whispered. It poked me and prodded me, nudged me, nagged me, and needled me until finally I had no choice but to throw my hands up in the air.
FINE. I’ll freak-ing jump.
And so, with fear squeezing my chest into knots, I jumped. I took a temp job in tech support even though I was terrified I would be fired for not knowing what I was doing. I moved out of my parents’ place even though I was convinced I would relapse. I made a financial decision to move back in with my parents two years later even though I was afraid that I would regress. And yes, even as recent as a month ago, I had to jump when I ended a romantic relationship that had been healthy and supportive but just not right even though I was afraid I was making the biggest mistake of my life.
Again and again, I have jumped, and yes, if you’re wondering, I am tired of it. I wish I could say the fear goes away. In some ways, in fact, I’ve found that it only grows. The thing is, though, I’ve jumped so many times now that somewhere in the back of my head, I’ve developed a touch of faith, faith that there is something on the other side.
That faith didn’t appear out of nowhere. It got there because I made the right gambles and the effort of pushing past fear paid off. A positive feedback loop that rewired my brain. I must stress that those jumps, they weren’t blind bets. They were decisions based on that voice in the back of my head, that pesky, stupid voice – my little, baby intuition – that never gives up telling me when it’s time. And even though I’m tired of jumping, every time I have made the decision to go with my gut, it has led me to inner peace.
This, the jump into the unknown, is the leap of faith that very few people tell you how to do. Perhaps it’s because most of us have the good fortune of never needing to do so, at least drastically, but I don’t like that explanation. I suspect, instead, that when we look closely at our lives, we see that there are many times, many forks in the road where we’ve had to make the jump. The one you have no comprehension of.
It can be a confusing experience. Your head and your heart may know what needs to be done, but your body just won’t let you go. Don’t jump! You’ll fall! And it’s a good thing that your body does that. It’s trying to protect you. It cares about you.
As my therapist likes to say, we don’t want to fight with any part of our system whether that’s our bodies, minds, or emotions. Instead, we want to seek alignment, partnership, collaboration. When we reach that synergy, that voice – our little, baby intuition – will let us know when we need to jump. All we have to do is screw our eyes shut and take that leap of faith.
Easy, right? No, it freaking sucks, but if you don’t do it – to quote a screenwriter I have complicated feelings about – you’ll become an old man, filled with regret, waiting to die alone. The choice is always yours. But listen, if I, a wacky, book-loving, off-tune singing, disorganized wierdo nerd can do it, why can’t you?
Didn’t think I’d leave you with just a dreary, motivational speech, did you? Here’s what I’m listening to while I get my emails done this morning (this might be sacrilege, but I think The Weeknd outdoes Ariana with his vocals).
Originally posted on LinkedIn.
