There was a season where everything felt possible. Not because we had it figured out, we didn't, but because for the first time in a long time, I could imagine more.
Not just more in the abstract way you tell yourself things will work out eventually. More in the specific, textured way. I could see it. The move. The life we actually wanted. The feeling of finally breaking from the script and choosing something that was genuinely ours.
That feeling is hard to describe if you've spent years just getting through. It's almost physical, a kind of lightness, a widening. Like the future stopped closing in and started opening up instead.
I was waking up energised. I was making plans that felt like votes for a life I actually wanted rather than obligations I'd inherited. For the first time in a long time, I wasn't just managing. I was imagining.
And then, in the space of about three weeks, the ground shifted. Not dramatically. There was no single moment. It was more like: one day I looked up and realised we weren't doing that anymore. The contracting job ended. Conversations that felt open suddenly felt closed. The move to Cairns, which had felt like the beginning of something, started to feel uncertain. And my body had its own answer to the question of another baby. A quiet, firm no that I had to listen to even when I didn't want to.
I don't want to skip past this part.
I was ready to expand. I had done a lot of the internal work, genuinely, not performatively. I'd spent weeks in my body processing old emotional material that had surfaced through the fascia work. Things I hadn't realised I was still carrying. On the Cairns trip I had spent real time grieving things I'd been holding for years, not dramatically, just steadily, letting it move through and leave. I came back feeling like I'd shed something that was never really mine.
And then the world said: not yet.
There's a particular kind of frustration in that. When you've done the work and you're finally ready and something external, something you have no control over, just shuts the door. Not forever. Just for now. But for now feels enormous when you were poised and ready and genuinely hopeful.
I don't want to pretend this isn't disappointing. It is. It's not a screaming kind of disappointment. It's the quiet kind. The kind that just settles in your chest and makes everything feel slightly muffled.
What I keep coming back to is this word: pause.
My life feels paused right now. Not broken, not reversed, not failed. Just waiting. And I'm discovering how hard that is. I live in a world, we all do, where momentum is the proof that you're doing it right. Forward motion as the measure of health, of success, of being on the right track. To stop moving is to fall behind. To be still is to be stuck.
Motherhood taught me something about this, actually. Becoming a mother teaches you very quickly that life just continues without you sometimes. The world doesn't pause because you're paused. And somewhere in that, in the loss of control, in the relinquishing, there's something important to learn. I know this. I've been learning it in layers for years. My husband would tell you I'm not naturally good at the in-between. I like to know what's coming. I like to have a plan. Living in ambiguity has always cost me something.
So right now, being forced into stillness is uncomfortable in a way that feels almost unbearable some days. And at the same time, I'm aware that the discomfort might be the point. That maybe the pause is where the next thing forms, not where it ends.
I've been thinking about what growth actually means for me right now. Because it's not what it looked like three months ago. It's not the expansion I was chasing. It's not pushing through or optimising the path forward. Maybe growth right now is just learning to stay. To sit in the uncertainty without abandoning myself. To stay soft when it would be easier to harden up and just push on.
Maybe steadiness is a form of strength I haven't practised enough.
I genuinely don't know what comes next. I'm not going to pretend I've found the lesson and wrapped it up neatly. I haven't. I'm still in it. But I'm trying to take this pause as something I'm meant to be in rather than something I need to escape. I keep coming back to the idea that this is the part of the story where everything goes quiet. And usually, something new forms in that quiet, if you can bear to stay still long enough to let it.
I'm trying to stay still.