I Dare You to Trust the Process

I spent years arguing with my life.

Why this. Why now. Why me. Why again.

I was good at it. The arguments were detailed and convincing and completely exhausting. I could build a case against the universe that would hold up in court. All the evidence was there. The losses. The timing. The specific cruelty of certain moments arriving exactly when I could least afford them.

I was right about everything and it got me absolutely nowhere.

Here is what nobody tells you about hitting the floor.

The floor is actually where you find out what you are made of. Not because suffering is noble or because pain builds character in some Instagram-worthy way. But because when everything is stripped away, when the career is gone and the friends have left and the version of yourself you had spent years building is unrecognisable, you are finally left with just you.

No role. No title. No performance.

Just the question: who are you when none of that is there?

I did not like the silence that question brought at first. It was loud in a way silence should not be. But I sat in it anyway. Because there was nothing else to do.

The shift did not happen in one moment. It happened slowly, the way most real things do.

I started noticing that every single door that had closed had been protecting me from something. The career that ended so brutally had been making me someone I did not want to be. The friendships that dissolved had been built on a version of me that was running on empty. The life that collapsed had been built on foundations that were never mine to begin with.

I did not choose any of those endings. But I started to see that something in the universe had chosen them for me. And that something had better judgment than I did at the time.

That was when I stopped asking why.

Not because I had answers. But because I started trusting that the answers were not mine to have yet.

I used to think my guardian angel had a drinking problem.

The evidence was compelling. Too many things going wrong at once. Too many well-laid plans dissolving. Too many moments where I looked around and thought, surely this cannot be right.

Now I think she was just working harder than I could see. Clearing things. Moving things. Making room for something that required all of that space.

I am on my second guardian angel now. The first one clearly needed a very long rest.

But they have my back. I feel it every day. In the dancing I went back to after years away. In the morning walks. In the two cats who arrived exactly when I needed them and asked for nothing except breakfast and occasional emotional support. In the writing that started as nowhere and became somewhere.

In the life that looks nothing like the one I planned and everything like the one I needed.

Gratitude is not toxic positivity. It is not pretending things did not hurt or that the losses were not real.

It is looking at everything that happened and saying: I see you. I survived you. And somehow, looking back, I would not change a single thing because every single one of those things brought me here.

Here is not perfect. Here is uncertain and still unfinished and full of questions I cannot answer yet.

But here is honest. And honest is the only place I have ever wanted to be.

The magic started the day I stopped asking why and started saying thank you.

I dare you to trust the process.

rise · believe · fly 🪶

From the Ashes She is for the woman in the middle of it. Not after. If this found you today, you are exactly where you are supposed to be.

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