Sometimes it takes being thrown into the deep end to realize what we’re capable of.
We rarely choose discomfort for its own sake. We build our lives around what we can count on. Our families, our jobs, our friends, our communities. The familiar route. The people who know us. There’s comfort in that predictability, a quiet reassurance in knowing what tomorrow will probably look like.
And yet, sometimes something begins to stir. A place we can’t stop thinking about. A path we thought we’d put behind us. An idea that returns in the quiet, long after we’ve explained to ourselves why it isn’t practical. For me, that pull has sometimes carried me farther than my courage could have managed on its own. I become absorbed in the possibility, the planning, the life I imagine waiting for me. Only later does it occur to me that I’ll have to leave the life I know to get there.
Looking back, I can still picture three moments when the life I’d been imagining became real, and I wondered whether I’d been brave or terribly delusional. What have I done? WHY have I done it? Why couldn’t I just stay put?
The first was a January morning in New Jersey. It was still dark when my family drove away from my Rutgers dorm.
But let me rewind. I was just settling into my dorm at the University of South Florida. With half of my undergraduate credits already completed, the plan was two years to finish my degree and then off to law school. The thing about plans is that they don’t always account for your embodied feelings once you’re there. Within 48 hours, I felt I was in the wrong city, at the wrong university, studying the wrong thing.
Knowing there was nothing to lose and desperate to be anywhere other than where I was, I emailed Rutgers, asked to transfer in as a dance major (without auditioning), and quickly threw myself into the distraction of planning my escape. Before long, I had my acceptance letter in hand and was arranging housing in New Brunswick.
I was elated. I was over the moon. There was nothing that could bring me down. And then I arrived.
My family had helped me move into my new dorm room (only four months after they had done the same thing in Tampa), and the morning had come for them to leave. As I stood at my fourth-floor dorm window and watched dawn break across the mountains of snow covering the parking lot, I felt a pit in my stomach. What had I done? I was in a state where I knew no one. I was starting a degree I didn’t even know if I was good enough for. It was cold and dark and lonely. I had spent every waking minute of the last four months waiting for this moment, and when it arrived, I realized just how much delusion had carried me there.
In many ways, I am thankful for the desperation and for not fully grasping where I was headed until that moment. Because I would have never leapt. I would have convinced myself I could be happy in South Florida. That I could be “like everyone else” and pick the safer path. The stable, predictable life.
I think of that version of my life at times. The work I would be doing, the family and kids I would probably be coming home to every day. The eventual midlife crisis that would almost certainly bubble up when I felt unsatisfied by the predictability.
I’m forever grateful to that slightly delusional, headstrong, eighteen-year-old dreamer. She decided my life’s path and purpose.
Years later, I felt that same rush of panic, this time locked in a bathroom stall at Heathrow airport.
I had graduated three months earlier and was off on my next adventure: pursuing a graduate degree in London. Having spent a year studying abroad there, the idea of returning felt purely nostalgic. Familiar streets. Adventure. A place I already loved.
When my family offered to help me move, that same delusional, headstrong, planner part of me replied with such certainty: “No, I’m totally okay moving by myself!”
And then I arrived.
As the wheels touched down at Heathrow, my email pinged. My coursework schedule was live. Suddenly, I wasn’t just returning to a city I loved. I was arriving alone to begin a graduate program that accepted only twelve people. And somehow, I was one of them.
By the time I collected my luggage, my certainty had dissolved. Within minutes, I was locked in a bathroom stall, struggling to catch my breath. What have I done? Why did I think I could do this by myself? I can’t do this. But I was already there.
I had thought so much about getting there. I hadn’t quite imagined how it would feel to arrive. My planner parts had carried me through the applications, the flight, the packing. Across an ocean, right up to the moment when there was nothing left to organize and I had to begin.
As I sobbed on the phone, the voice on the other end said, “Lexie, you can come home. You don’t have to stay.” And the moment I was offered an out, I knew I had to move forward. If I left, I would always wonder what might have happened if I’d stayed. I owed it to the version of myself who had dreamed of this and worked to get here to give it a chance.
So I collected myself as best I could and unlocked the door. I cried all the way into the city centre. To my flat. As I unpacked my things. Eventually, the fear began to settle and my determination returned. I took one step forward. And then another.
I couldn’t yet picture the life I would build there. But I’m grateful to the version of me who chose to stay long enough to find out.
The third moment came at the beginning of 2025.
This time, I didn’t have to cross an ocean. I was still in the city I knew, doing work I loved. But I had reached a ceiling at the studio where I was teaching. I knew the routine. I knew what was expected of me. I could picture another year, and then another. That was becoming part of the problem.
I wanted room to discover what my work could become. What I could build if I stopped waiting for that room to be given to me. So I started renting space and teaching a handful of clients, still unsure how it would all work out.
There were practical things to figure out. Space, schedules, bookings. Things I could put on a list and work through. Underneath them was a question I couldn’t cross off. Could I actually do this?
Over and over again, I had chosen freedom over stability. Inspiration over predictability. Honestly, it is less of a choice and more of a knowing. I just couldn’t force myself to make the more reasonable decision. To stay at USF and continue on the path to law school. To withdraw from the graduate program that accepted only eleven others from across the globe. To settle into the monotony of working for someone else’s business.
And still, that knowing didn’t spare me the fear. I could feel certain that I needed to leave and completely unsure of what would happen once I did.
And looking back, I would choose it all again. Even knowing I would sometimes wish, briefly and desperately, for the comfort of the life I had left. Each choice brought me closer to a life that feels like mine. Truly, authentically, indescribably mine. Shaped by what I love most in the world, what inspires me the deepest, and what pushes me to become the best version of myself every single day.
Looking back, I can see how much of what I believed I could do came from what I’d already done. Beyond that was unfamiliar territory. I had mistaken my inability to picture myself there for an inability to manage it. But each time, I learned. I adjusted. I asked questions. I kept showing up until something that had once felt beyond me became part of my life.
Those experiences gave me memories to return to when the next possibility frightened me. I had felt this before. I had begun without knowing how. I had found my footing.
I’m learning that I can trust a decision and still feel afraid when it becomes real. That the knot in my stomach doesn’t erase the reasons I wanted to go. Sometimes, following your gut means taking the next step before you have every answer. Letting yourself be a beginner. Giving yourself time to discover the skills you haven’t needed yet.
I think about the girl watching her family drive away from Rutgers. The girl crying in a bathroom stall at Heathrow. The new business owner, with a handful of clients and no guarantee.
None of them knew how it would turn out. I’m so glad they stayed to find out.
So if there’s something you keep imagining, something that finds you when the day gets quiet, perhaps you can give yourself a moment to listen. You may feel afraid when you arrive. You may need time to find your footing. There may also come a day when you look around at the life you’ve built and feel grateful to the version of you who went anyway.
What might you give yourself the chance to find out?
