The Space Between

Sometimes she felt like she was living two lives: one in her head and one in the world.

Those two lives were often as different as night and day, leaving her to wonder which one was real.

She spent a lot of time trying to figure it all out.

Who was she, really?

Was she the person she saw when she looked in the mirror, or was she the person that others saw her to be?
Was she the sum of her thoughts and intentions, or of her actions and her results?
Was she the person she’d once been or the person she had worked so hard to become?

These were the questions that kept her spinning in place, second-guessing her every move, her every motive, her every desire.

She believed she had to choose one way over another:

Serving herself or serving others,
Being spiritual or being human,
Making a paycheck or making a difference.

She kept going back and forth between these two paths, those two worlds, those two choices, separating herself into two people and constantly feeling like she was missing something, like she was doing it wrong, like her limits were too great to overcome.

It was dizzying and confusing and disorienting.

It was also familiar and comfortable and completely predictable.

It didn’t make her happy, but in a strange way it made her feel like she was in control.

She knew this story like the back of her hand.
She knew how it always began and how it would always inevitably end.
She knew, and knowing was better…

Until it wasn’t.
Until her fear of things staying the same became greater than her fear of the unknown.
Until she had no other choice than to do things differently, while she still could.

And that’s when she saw it.

In the space between past and future, good and bad, right and wrong,
In the space between what was going on in her head and what was happening in the world,
In the space between who she thought she was and who she knew herself to be…

She saw that she didn’t have to be one thing or the other.

She could be both
She could be all of the above.
She could be anything and everything she wanted to be.

“I was never being limited by the choices I had”, she said. “But by the choices I was allowing myself to see”.