Happy in the Fire?

I’ve been sitting with something all week, and I think it’s time I said it out loud.

You know I’m a story lover. What I love most is when a story is so beautifully crafted that even though it’s fiction, it has real bones. The characters have a spine. And every story we know and love, every single one, has that stretch where the character gets put all the way through it. The loss. The trials. The part where everything they’ve built starts to shake. We call it the rising action, and watching it, we understand it’s the necessary part, shit its the juicy part. The ones we crave in a movie or tv show and nobody becomes who they’re supposed to be without it.

I always understood that about stories. I just never wanted to admit it was true about a life. Mine, specifically and also yours too.

So let me take you back to where my story starts.

When I was a kid, I spent most of my time at my aunt’s house in the Ninth Ward in New Orleans. It was a little shotgun house. If you’re not from New Orleans, that’s a house that runs in one straight shot from the front door to the back, no side rooms, nothing broken off. The name comes from the idea that you could fire a shotgun through the front door and it’d sail clean out the back without hitting a thing. My parents were both working full time to keep food on the table, so that little house is really where I grew up.

Photo of the childhood home i spent time in with my aunts in New Orleans

And I was happy there in a way I’ve been chasing ever since.

It was before devices, before everybody had a phone in their hand. We’d spend a whole summer on the porch waiting for the ice cream truck to turn the corner. I can still feel one of those popsicles shaped like a little face, the ones with the gumball eyes, melting faster than I could catch it, me trying to sop it up before it disappeared. Walking to the library. Walking to the corner store. My mind just full of whatever was right in front of me, instead of cluttered up with worry and overthinking.

And in that state, I made things constantly. You could find me curled in the corner of the bunk bed writing poems in my little five star notebook. Millennials, if you know, you know. You could catch me beading jewelry I was, of course, already selling to my mother’s coworkers, because I’ve been an entrepreneur since before I had a bank account. Painting along with that little step by step drawing show on TV. Making up whole routines to Puff Daddy’s “I’ll Be Missing You,” which, listen, is a complicated thing to admit now, but we did it.

Here’s the thing I understand now that I couldn’t have told you then. It wasn’t the poems or the painting that mattered. It was the feeling underneath them. That carefree, present, unclenched feeling is the thing that let the creativity pour out of me in the first place. The faucet was open because nothing in me was bracing. I felt like anything was possible, because I hadn’t yet learned to be afraid of how good it felt.

Now here’s what happened to that little house.

That whole part of the city got wiped out during Hurricane Katrina. That house and so many others just like it, totally flooded . And then, slowly, rebuilt from the ground up. And I can’t get over this part. Back then that house rented for what, a couple hundred dollars a month? Last time I checked, after somebody renovated it and redid it and poured into it, it sold for almost four, five hundred thousand dollars. Same house. Same bones. Same little straight shot from front to back. It went through the most total destruction you can imagine and came out the other side worth more than it had ever been.

Sit with that, because I think it’s the whole thing. The flood didn’t lower that house’s value. What raised it was the care somebody was willing to pour into the rebuild. The destruction was the middle of the story, not the end of it.

I just wish I’d known to apply that to myself.

Because life did to me what the water did to that home, over and over again

The older I got, the more I started living through my own rising action. Loss. Abandonment, Betrayal. The whole reel. And somewhere in there, quietly, without my permission, I formed a subconscious belief. I need you to catch this, because a subconscious belief isn’t one you choose on purpose. There are probably a thousand of them running underneath your day right now, quietly making your decisions for you.

The one I picked up was this. It’s not safe to be happy.

Because if I let myself get too happy, I could get caught off guard. By loss. By betrayal. By the floor dropping out. So the very thing that had been the faucet for my creativity slowly became the clog in the drain. That open, unclenched feeling that used to let everything flow, I taught myself it was dangerous.

And even now that I can name it, I couldn’t back then. Back then it was just a feeling. I’d get so far into my work, so far into something good, and then something around me would happen, and my whole system would just retreat. Like a thermostat clicking itself back down to a temperature that feels safe. Not off. Just dialed down, away from full throttle.

Here’s the mechanism I couldn’t see for years. Every time the temperature climbed to where it started to feel unfamiliar, where the joy got big enough to feel exposed, I’d turn around and walk myself right back to the temperature I already knew. Back to comfortable. And comfortable felt like relief, so I told myself I was being wise. Being careful. Protecting myself.

But that turning back was the ceiling. Not a thing that happened to me at the ceiling. The ceiling itself. Every single time I got to the edge of the unfamiliar and chose comfortable instead, I was quietly agreeing to never get past it. Same wall, over and over, dressed up as a good decision.

And the cruelest part is that full throttle, that too warm, uncomfortable temperature, is exactly where everything I wanted was living. My best work. My clients. My fulfillment. My joy. All of it waiting at a heat I kept refusing to stay in long enough to get used to. I was that flooded house refusing to be rebuilt, because being rebuilt meant sitting in the wreckage a while first.

And here’s the part that turned it from a me thing into the thing I do for a living.

I started seeing it in my clients. They never named it. They didn’t have the words either. But because I’d lived it so intimately in myself, I could spot it across a Zoom screen in about four minutes flat. They’d want a certain level of success, and right as they got close, they’d stop themselves. All of a sudden they were scared of being visible. All of a sudden there wasn’t enough time. All of a sudden a money thing, a relationship thing, some thing showed up to take the joy they’d just built and the momentum they’d just stacked and drag it all the way back to zero.

Every time. Right at the edge.

So if you’re living some version of this, where you can only get so far down the road before you turn around and walk back down the same road you already covered, where you keep arriving at the same spot and never get past it, this might be what’s running your show too.

Brené Brown has a name for it. She calls it foreboding joy. The bracing. The waiting for the other shoe. The refusing to fully land in a beautiful moment because part of you is already scanning the horizon for whatever’s coming to take it.

I brought it to a mentor of mine this morning . And before the words were all the way out of my mouth, before I could finish asking what do you do when everything’s thrashing around you and you still want to stay in your flow, I heard my own answer.

The thrashing was also mine.

It looked like the chaos was coming at me from the outside. But so much of it was something I made, because every time I got too happy, I’d go looking. I’d turn my head to see what was about to go wrong. And a person who’s always looking for the thing that’s about to go wrong has a real gift for finding it.

So I’m not on here telling you I found the holy grail. It is a work in progress.

What I’m doing is handing you the question, because naming it is the whole first move.

How happy are you actually letting yourself be? How deep into your flow will you go before some old part of you decides it’s gotten dangerous in here and reaches for the thermostat? And when something does shake, because something always shakes, that’s the rising action, that’s every story ever told, how do you lead yourself through it instead of using it as proof that you were right not to get comfortable?

I keep coming back to that house. It didn’t become worth more in spite of being destroyed. It became worth more because somebody was willing to stand in the wreckage and pour into it until it was something new. The heat is where the value gets made. The fire is the renovation.

This is still a process your girl is navigating, we are not going to lie on Beyonce’s internet today….but it’s one I am growing through gracefully . These days I am staying in the heat long enough to let it make me into something worth more. Im allowing myself to be happy in the fire and teaching so many women how to do the same.

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