I’d given up on finding a name for the shape I was looking for, and thought the hole needed to be carved bespoke. I’d spent too long being other shapes that I had forgotten where my boundaries lay. I stopped seeing what was THERE. I had stopped listening to myself and asked the world what I should do, and got a million answers in response, all of which were partly right. I forgot that my destiny evolves AS I DO and what I choose to do does not restrain me still but gives me a platform to build on, to mould around myself and make into something other than the neat-and-tidy, well-ordered pigeon hole I so dislike.
Sometimes all it takes is for something to move for everything to shift and suddenly fit into place. In the unlikeliest of places, answers stare you in the face and when it happens, you can feel the OH YES barrelling up from your belly and erupting in a geyser of laughter and joy. It just happened to me and made me feel like a bottle of champagne: fizzing and happy and full of life and potential and creativity. It opens up things inside you and it brings back those childhood feelings where you thought that anything in the world was possible, just because you WANTED it, those feelings where faeries were real and danced on the tips of your fingers and the moon was made of cheese and your absolute certainty that if you travelled far enough, you would find places where houses were really made of gingerbread and armchairs really did grow wings and fly.
It’s the magic of possibility that I forgot and the feeling that EVERY DAY is an adventure. I am poised and ready for stories of smugglers and giants and cannibalistic shoes. I am open to streaming, gilded lights in gardens and magenta horses wearing pearls on magazine shoots. I am standing on the edge of a precipice with my arms out wide and my hair streaming and READY to take that step that will send me cannon-balling through life, scattering the conventions that have held me back like skittles.
It took a series of moments standing by a carved out hollow in a hill in the moonlit dark in the wind and rain to find that CONNECTION again. That feeling of remembering, of roots and ancestors and potential. It took a place of power to remind me of my own. It took somewhere exceptional to remind me that I am.
Knowing that I was a piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit was my catalyst. It kept my mind open and promised me quietly, night after night, that answers would come and opportunities would come knocking. Vigilance, it said, was the key to growth and in a moment where I most needed it, answers came. If I hadn’t been open-minded, and more importantly, open-HEARTED I might not have paid attention. I might have dismissed it. I might have let it pass me by. I didn’t. Instead, I embraced it. I took a deep breath and said YES.