This weekend, I celebrated a dear friend’s birthday. In the middle of the laughter, she shared something that felt like truth. She’s going back to school to study something entirely different.Something creative.Something that makes her feel alive again after years of being purely academic.
Everyone clapped, calling her courageous and inspiring.And that made me think. Does change really need to be brave?Is returning to yourself considered rebellion?Should the choices we made when we were barely adults, with a frontal lobe not yet fully developed, dictate the rest of our lives or worse, define who we are?
We were told to pick a life path early and stay loyal to it, even when it no longer fits.
To keep the job because it’s stable and pays the bills.
To stay in an unhappy marriage because it looks good on paper, plus what will the neighbors think?
To fake perfection and bliss as if our lives depended on it.
To silence the quiet voice that whispers, “There must be more to life than this.”
But that voice, the whisper that refuses to be silenced, could it be your calling?Or your soul resisting confinement, asking to breathe, to expand, to live?
That voice grows louder when it is exhausted from pretending.Often, it begins to yell and plead when the life you built starts to suffocate the person you are becoming.
Trust me, I heard her from a very young age, and I am grateful to have followed her blindly through every stage of my life.
Maybe you are going through a divorce, learning to rebuild your life one decision at a time, alone.
Maybe you are shifting careers, hoping to create a better world for your children.
Maybe you just met that love that finally feels different, gentler, wiser, after years of mistaking pain for passion.
Or maybe you are the corporate boss who has it all, yet feels the quiet pull to create life, to become a mother to a new soul.
Whatever your story is, beginning again isn’t an act of bravery. It’s an act of truth.A return to self.
Not because you are not enough, but because you are ready for more.
At twenty, we chose from expectation.
At forty-five, we choose from awareness.
And that kind of choice doesn’t need permission, approval, or applause. It only needs alignment within, a return to self.
You move forward, even if it means walking alone for a while.
You begin again, even if your hands are still shaking.
Because the moment you remember you are free, free to change, free to shift, free to follow a different path, free to love again, free to dream again, free to live again, everything shifts.And what a shift that is.
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