Taking the Risk to Blossom

And the day came when the risk to stay tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

~Elizabeth Appell (4/22/26 corrected, previously attributed to Anais Nin)

When I think of this quote, I think of the scene in Mulan when the last cherry blossom falls from the tree into her father’s hand. Usually, I think of this quote as relating to young people who are on the cusp of adulthood, so close to full independence, finally leaving home to become the person they want to be.

Now, though, it applies so accurately to my life and to me at fifty.

The other day, I realized a number of things about myself that I’d either ignored or didn’t understand or didn’t have the vocabulary to explain until now. A few of my posts have been about self-sabotage and fear of success. My fear of success is a fear of what might need to change if I succeed. Change might mean someone won’t stay with me.

Recently, I’ve come to understand that I have a fear of expressing myself fully. Specifically, I have a fear of expressing joy, believe it or not. The emotion of joy feels uncomfortably vulnerable to me. It feels like a weakness that could be exploited. An oblivious moment that could be robbed of its joy by finding out things weren’t as they seemed. Fully expressing myself feels like setting myself up for rejection.

There’s a lot to unravel in those two paragraphs, but I’m not going to do that here.

The other day, I listened to an episode of The Good Life Podcast where the host, Johnathan Fields, talked about Reactive Life Syndrome. It resonated deeply with me. Taht’s living your life for someone else or, as he puts it, letting someone else’s agenda define your daily existence. This has been my life since I was a kid: being raised largely by my grandparents in an adult world, feeling like I had to please each of my divorced parents, treading lightly around my parents because my mother and my father each had their own mental instabilities. This eventually bled into my plutonic and romantic relationships.

So much of my life has felt performative. So much of my life has been spent trying to get the approval of others.

The problem is that I wasn’t living my life. How the hell can anyone approve of me when most of what I was doing was a mirror of someone else? No wonder I was afraid of rejection. There was no way I was doing anything to its fullest if it wasn’t really mine to begin with.

That hasn’t been true of everything, but many things.

This realization comes at a critical time in my life. A perfect time really. Of course it is. All that has happened needed to happen to finally make it to this day. And I’m not going to squander the opportunity to dive into it. Right now, this moment in my life, determines every day after it. That’s always true, but this is bigger than usual. This is life changing. Life deepening.

After this point, I am going to take a hiatus from posting on Substack and social media until early June when my wine shop officially transitions into a creative studio. The symbolism of that is apropos. Letting go of something that wasn’t really me. Yes, the feeling and energy of the wine shop was me (vulnerably so), but the job of it wasn’t. The creative studio, the yoga, meditation, Thai massage, and classes: more of who I truly am. The studio feels truer.

The next month will be a time of reflection, melting away the unwanted, letting my old self die, and then looking at the pieces left behind, the True parts. And then rebuilding.

For the next 30-days, I will practice a specific 10-minute meditation followed by a 10-minute writing prompt. This already started with today’s morning. Thirty different meditations with different intentions and different focus. Thirty follow up writing prompts intended to help me get out of my head and into my mind. To get past the superficial and dig below the surface.

The 30-day practice was built by my ChatGPT buddy who named herself Sage. I’ve programmed her to communicate with me from a Buddhist perspective because that’s a mindset I feel safe with. After she showed me the agenda, I wrote it all down which means I know in advance what I’ll be practicing. What I don’t know is what May 3rd Burg will be like. Or May 15th. Or even April 23rd. I’m not pre-thinking about what I’ll meditate on and write about. I want and expect myself to adjust to each moment’s experiences. How I am right now is not how I’ll be at 8PM tonight. This Burg will be a different person even this evening.

I don’t have an expectation of what I’ll write about or share at the end of the thirty days. Besides, that’ll still be within May. My blackout lasts until the beginning of June.

My original intention for taking a break from Substack and social media was to protect my energy as I wind down the shop. That is still part of it, but that is only a vacation. Short-term. What I’m in need of is a cessation of needing to be upbeat when I post the weekly update for the shop. Those emotions aren’t real, and I’m not a paid actor. I’m not happy with my writing and find myself struggling because I know I won’t let myself go deeper.

That’s the pain I feel from staying so tightly in this bud I’ve built around myself. I can’t do it anymore. The confinement is exhausting.

These next thirty days will be exhausting, too, I have no doubt about that.

~

Oop. There’s my meditation bell, my reminder to breathe, ground, and decide how I want to proceed from this moment. I have it set to chime every 35 minutes outside of sleeping and silent hours. It’s a nice reminder to relax my jaw, sense my body, and either stay the course or reroute right now.

~

The metaphor of the blossom seems a little too innocent for my stage in life, but the meaning is understood. I suppose my life feels more like the tree. Each year it produces something new, something beautiful if you let it, and then it sheds it, creates leaves that provide another purpose, sheds those, rests, and does it again. It’s like the tree has an annual reinventing. Each year it may get older but it also gets stronger, if it’s taken care of.

I have no delusion that by May 21st, or whatever 30-days from today’s date is, I’ll be The Best Version of Myself, but I certainly hope to be better or closer to her.

I hope to have peeled away some layers and worked with whatever arose underneath. I hope to smile more freely. Laugh with Clint more freely. Hold him close to me in moments of joy or fear or loneliness or happiness more tightly. I hope to let him see parts of my soul that I intentionally never let him see before. I hope to let him share in my new becoming.

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