When the Fire Burns Everything Down

A few days ago, while finally organizing a storage bin that had remained unopened since I moved into my apartment six months ago, I found a letter.

It was dated April 2024.

I had written it to a future version of myself while attending a retreat in Zihuatanejo, Mexico. I remember sitting in the sand, staring out at the roaring Pacific Ocean as waves crashed against the shoreline, trying to put into words the life I hoped I was creating and the woman I wanted to become. I wanted her to feel free. I wanted her to have found peace within herself, to have learned how to quiet the relentless noise of her mind, to trust herself more deeply, to stop allowing fear and anxiety to dictate so much of her experience of being alive.

I remember how hopeful I was. How proud I felt of the decisions I’d made in the preceding years. How convinced I was that I was finally beginning to understand what it meant to live consciously, to surrender, to trust the universe and the extraordinary possibilities that could unfold when you had the courage to follow your own path.

And I remember absolutely none of the fear I would have felt had I known what was waiting for me when I returned home.

Because that woman, sitting on the beach with all her beautiful hopes for the future, had no fucking idea what was coming.

She didn’t know that in a matter of weeks, the life she thought she understood would begin unraveling. That the next two years would bring a kind of pain she couldn’t have imagined, or that nearly everything she’d come to believe about herself, her spirituality, the life she was building, and the universe she’d placed so much faith in would be called into question.

She didn’t know that there would come a time when she’d wake up in the morning and pray for nothing more extraordinary than making it through the day without crying. That she’d spend nights desperately wishing she could quiet her mind long enough to sleep. That there would be moments when breathing felt difficult, when taking care of herself felt like an accomplishment, when the woman who once devoted two hours every morning to her spiritual practices would struggle to find the motivation to do much of anything at all.

And she certainly didn’t know how angry she was about to become.

I sat there holding that letter, thinking about the woman who had written it, and felt an almost unbearable tenderness for her. I wanted to reach back through time and wrap my arms around her. To hold her for just a little while longer before she returned home to a life that was about to become almost unrecognizable.

But to understand why finding that letter affected me so profoundly, I need to tell you about something I’ve spent the better part of two years trying to understand.

What happens when the fire actually burns everything down?

Not metaphorically. Not in the beautifully packaged way we tend to describe transformation once we’ve survived it. I mean what happens when the life you’ve built, the beliefs you’ve relied upon, and the person you’ve worked so hard to become begin collapsing around you, and you have absolutely no idea whether anything will be left when it’s over.

Because we love talking about death and rebirth.

Spend enough time in the spiritual community and you’ll hear about ego deaths, tower moments, dark nights of the soul, phoenixes rising from ashes, caterpillars becoming butterflies. One of my personal favorites has always been the birth of a star: the extraordinary process through which a vast cloud of gas and dust collapses under its own gravity until the conditions for something entirely new to ignite are created.

I’ve always loved these metaphors. Perhaps it’s my Scorpio rising, or perhaps it’s simply that I’ve found comfort in the idea that destruction doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the story. That sometimes the very thing that appears to be falling apart is undergoing a transformation we cannot yet comprehend.

But I’ve developed a rather serious problem with the way we tell these stories.

We’re obsessed with the rebirth.

We love the butterfly spreading its wings. The phoenix emerging triumphantly from the ashes. The woman who loses everything and returns with some extraordinary revelation about how the universe was working in her favor all along.

We love hearing about the moment everything finally makes sense.

But what about the part before that?

What about the space between the collapse and whatever comes next? When the fire has already consumed everything familiar, but there’s nothing emerging from the ashes. When you no longer recognize the person you used to be, have no idea who you’re becoming, and aren’t even entirely convinced you want to become someone new if this is what it’s going to cost you.

We have a beautiful word for that space: liminality.

And I think we’ve done ourselves an enormous disservice by making it sound so fucking poetic.

Because when you’re actually living inside it, there is nothing particularly beautiful about it.

It doesn’t feel like evolution. It feels like destruction. It feels like waking up every morning hoping that today will finally be the day something changes, only to go to sleep with the same unbearable questions you woke up with. It feels like trying desperately to understand what’s happening to your life while slowly losing confidence in your ability to understand anything at all.

And perhaps the cruelest part is that you have absolutely no way of knowing whether you’re in the middle of some extraordinary transformation or simply watching your life fall apart.

We love telling people that growth is uncomfortable. Get comfortable being uncomfortable. Take the leap. Trust the process. Surrender to the unknown.

I’ve repeated those words myself. I’ve built entire chapters of my life around them.

But there’s something I wish I’d understood sooner.

Growth is considerably easier to embrace when you believe you know what you’re growing toward.

In 2022, I took what I considered the greatest leap of faith of my life. I walked away from a life that, by conventional standards, offered nearly everything I was supposed to want. Stability, security, success, and a future that made sense. I left my home state and moved somewhere I didn’t know a single person because I wanted to discover who I was without the expectations and projections of everyone who had always known me.

I wanted to know what it would feel like to build a life that was genuinely mine. To pursue what set my soul on fire rather than what society had conditioned me to believe would make me successful. To discover whether I could create something extraordinary simply by having the courage to trust myself.

And it was terrifying.

But it was also exhilarating, because I knew what I was moving toward. I was choosing the discomfort. I was making the sacrifices. I was dismantling the familiar in pursuit of something I wanted more.

For a long time, I thought that was my great death and rebirth.

And don’t misunderstand me. It was one of the most courageous decisions I’ve ever made, and it fundamentally changed the trajectory of my life.

But looking back, I realize I was still holding the pen.

I was the one choosing what to leave behind. I was the one deciding when to begin again. I had a vision of the future that made the uncertainty feel worthwhile.

I hadn’t yet experienced what it meant to have that vision taken away from me.

I hadn’t experienced the particular terror of being forced into the unknown without any reassurance that what waited on the other side would be something I actually wanted.

And I certainly hadn’t experienced what it felt like to desperately want the fire to stop, only to discover that I had absolutely no control over how long it would burn.

That came later.

And when it did, I was anything but graceful.

I wish I could tell you that after years of studying spirituality, consciousness, and the extraordinary complexity of the human experience, I recognized what was happening. That I surrendered peacefully, trusted the universe, and accepted that perhaps I was undergoing another profound transformation.

But I didn’t.

I fought it.

I fought it with every ounce of strength I had, and when that strength began to run out, I fought it with whatever was left.

I tried to understand it. I tried to reason my way through it. I tried to find the lesson, identify the pattern, make the right decision, and somehow regain control over circumstances that seemed determined to remain outside my control.

And when none of that worked, I became furious.

Not disappointed. Not mildly disillusioned.

Furious.

I was furious with what was happening to me. Furious with the uncertainty. Furious with the fact that I could do everything within my power to change my circumstances and still find myself waking up in the same unbearable reality.

But more than anything, I was furious with the universe.

With God. With Source. With whatever name you give to the thing I’d spent years believing was somehow guiding me.

Because what the actual fuck?

I had done the work.

I had spent years studying consciousness, confronting my shadows, examining my patterns, practicing gratitude, meditating, journaling, repeating affirmations, visualizing the life I wanted to create. I’d attended retreats, taken the leaps of faith, made the uncomfortable decisions, and devoted myself to becoming someone who lived with greater intention and awareness.

I had my perfectly curated two-hour morning routine. My journal. My meditation. My gratitude practice. My affirmations. My guided visualizations.

I was doing everything I thought I was supposed to be doing.

And for what?

To end up here?

To find myself in a kind of pain that made getting through twenty-four hours feel like an accomplishment? To question everything I’d worked so hard to believe? To look at the life I’d courageously dismantled and wonder whether I’d made a catastrophic mistake?

I felt betrayed.

And I know how uncomfortable that word might make some people. Betrayed by the universe? As though the universe had entered into some contractual agreement to protect me from suffering?

But that’s exactly how it felt.

Somewhere along the way, I’d come to believe that if I remained devoted to my growth, if I did the inner work, if I followed my intuition and made the courageous choices, surely life would eventually meet that devotion with something meaningful.

Surely all that faith had to count for something.

And now I was looking around at the ruins of everything I thought I understood, wondering whether I’d been a complete fucking idiot for believing any of it.

There were moments when I wanted to abandon the entire spiritual journey.

I wanted to go back to the world I’d worked so hard to leave behind. Back to the predictable structures, the conventional definitions of success, the things I could measure and control. I wanted to stop searching for meaning in every experience and start believing only in things I could actually see.

Because at least in that world, I understood the rules.

And what made it worse was that I was ashamed of feeling this way.

I wasn’t simply devastated. I was devastated that I was devastated.

I’d spent years becoming someone who was supposed to know how to navigate difficult emotions, someone who understood the importance of surrender, who knew how to regulate her nervous system, who could recognize that growth wasn’t linear.

And yet there I was, crying until I was physically exhausted, struggling to maintain the most basic routines, wondering what had happened to the woman who once approached life with so much conviction.

I missed her.

God, I missed her.

I missed the woman who woke up excited about the day ahead. Who genuinely believed in the possibilities unfolding before her. Who had the energy to spend two hours every morning cultivating a relationship with herself because she loved the person she was becoming.

I missed the certainty with which she trusted her intuition. The ease with which she believed that life was happening for her rather than to her.

And the harder I tried to find her, the more convinced I became that I’d somehow failed.

Because surely, after everything I’d done to become more conscious, more resilient, more connected to myself, I shouldn’t have been struggling this much.

Surely I should have been stronger.

Surely I should have been further along.

I cannot adequately describe the exhaustion of fighting to survive something while simultaneously hating yourself for how difficult surviving has become.

And the world doesn’t stop just because yours is falling apart.

You still have responsibilities. Work to do. Decisions to make. A life to maintain. People who need things from you. Dreams that don’t suddenly disappear because you no longer have the emotional capacity to pursue them.

So you keep going.

You get out of bed. You answer the email. You attend the meeting. You make the decision. You do whatever needs to be done, sometimes through tears, sometimes on autopilot, sometimes with an almost unbearable resentment that life keeps demanding things of you when you’re barely holding yourself together.

And then you wake up the next morning and do it all over again.

There’s something deeply lonely about that kind of existence. Because from the outside, your life may continue looking relatively normal. You might even be accomplishing things other people would consider impressive.

But you know what it’s costing you.

You know how much effort it takes to do things that once came naturally. You know how many times you’ve had to pull yourself together just to participate in an ordinary day. You know how often you’ve gone to sleep wondering how the fuck you’re supposed to wake up and do it again.

And because you know all of that, because you’re intimately acquainted with every moment of your own struggle, you begin to see yourself almost exclusively through the lens of how badly you’re struggling.

You stop recognizing what you’re accomplishing.

Nothing counts.

If you manage to get through the day without falling apart, you’re frustrated that getting through the day is apparently all you’re capable of.

If you accomplish something meaningful, you immediately think about everything else you should have accomplished by now.

If you experience a moment of happiness, you’re terrified of how quickly it might disappear.

And if you somehow manage to continue building a life through all of it, you barely notice, because you’re too consumed by the fact that you still haven’t found your way out of the darkness.

That’s the part I don’t think we talk about enough.

Not simply the pain of transformation, but the way pain can distort your perception of yourself.

How it can make you forget every extraordinary thing you’ve already done because you’re so focused on everything you haven’t yet overcome.

How it can convince you that you’re standing still when, in reality, you’re exhausting yourself just trying to move forward.

How you can spend so long waiting for the light at the end of the tunnel that you stop noticing the distance you’ve traveled through the dark.

And I think what made it all so unbearable was that I couldn’t see an end.

If someone had told me exactly how long it would last, perhaps I could have endured it differently. If I’d known what I was moving toward, perhaps I could have found some comfort in believing that every painful day was bringing me closer to something.

But I didn’t know.

I didn’t know when things would change. I didn’t know whether they would change. I didn’t know whether the future I’d once imagined was still possible or whether I was going to have to grieve that, too.

And after a while, the absence of answers becomes its own kind of suffering.

You begin bargaining with time.

Maybe next month. Maybe after this happens. Maybe once I make this decision. Maybe once I finally understand what I’m supposed to be learning.

You keep moving the imaginary finish line because the alternative is confronting the possibility that there may not be one you can see.

And every time you think you’ve finally found your footing, something happens that reminds you just how fragile it still is.

You become exhausted by your own hope.

Because hope, when you’ve been disappointed enough times, can begin to feel like another form of punishment. Another opportunity to imagine something beautiful only to watch it slip through your fingers.

There were moments when I desperately wanted to stop caring. To stop hoping. To stop wanting things I couldn’t guarantee I’d ever have.

But I couldn’t.

I still cared. I still hoped. I still wanted a life that felt beautiful and meaningful, even when the effort of continuing to believe in that possibility felt almost unbearable.

And I hated that, too.

I hated that I couldn’t simply become indifferent. That I couldn’t turn off the part of myself that still believed things could be different.

So I continued living somewhere between hope and despair, trying to find my way through a darkness I couldn’t understand, toward a future I couldn’t see.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, I began to lose sight of something else.

Myself.

Not the person I was in the middle of the suffering. I was painfully aware of her. I knew every fear, every insecurity, every moment of frustration and exhaustion.

I mean the person who existed beyond it.

The woman who had once been brave enough to leave an entire life behind. The woman who had created a home for herself somewhere unfamiliar. Who had built relationships, pursued passions, and continued making decisions that reflected the person she genuinely wanted to be.

I could remember that woman, but I couldn’t seem to recognize her in myself anymore.

All I could see was what I thought I’d lost.

And I think that’s where the image of the caterpillar began to haunt me.

Because when we talk about a caterpillar becoming a butterfly, we tend to skip over what actually happens inside the chrysalis.

We imagine something almost magical. A creature goes to sleep as one thing and wakes up as another, transformed into something infinitely more beautiful.

But metamorphosis is a far more radical process than that.

Much of the caterpillar’s existing body is broken down and reorganized. Structures that once sustained its entire existence are dismantled as an entirely different form develops.

And I remember thinking: if a caterpillar possessed human consciousness, if it could remember what it once was and experience the destruction of everything familiar without knowing what was happening, would it have any idea it was becoming a butterfly?

Or would it think it was dying?

Because that’s what it felt like.

Not becoming.

Dying.

Watching pieces of myself that I’d spent years cultivating seemingly disappear, without any indication that something else was taking shape in their place.

I wasn’t standing in the middle of some magnificent spiritual transformation admiring the extraordinary possibilities of my future.

I was trying to survive the dissolution of a life I had worked so fucking hard to create.

And there were days when I genuinely wondered whether I’d ever feel like myself again.

What I couldn’t see, what I was far too consumed by the experience to recognize, was that even while I felt as though everything was falling apart, I hadn’t stopped living.

I hadn’t stopped building.

I hadn’t stopped making choices, pursuing things that mattered to me, or trying to create a life I could feel proud of.

I just couldn’t see any of it.

Because every accomplishment was overshadowed by the pain that still existed. Every step forward felt insignificant compared with how far I believed I still had to go.

And I was so fucking hard on myself.

For not being stronger. For not healing faster. For not having accomplished more. For not being the woman I thought I should have become by now.

I spent so much time grieving the person I’d been before everything happened that I never stopped to consider what it had taken to become the person who was still standing.

I didn’t recognize how much strength it required to continue showing up for a life that had become so difficult to inhabit.

I didn’t recognize the courage involved in making decisions without the certainty I’d once relied upon.

I didn’t recognize that continuing to build something meaningful while my heart was breaking was, in itself, an extraordinary act of determination.

I couldn’t recognize any of it because I was still inside the experience.

And when you’re fighting your way through hell, you don’t exactly have the luxury of stopping to admire how far you’ve come.

You’re too busy trying to get out.

So I kept going.

Not gracefully. Not consistently. Not always with faith or conviction or any particular sense that what I was doing would eventually lead somewhere worthwhile.

Sometimes I kept going because I genuinely believed things would get better.

Sometimes because I was too stubborn to give up.

And sometimes because the only thing I knew how to do was get through the next twenty-four hours and hope that tomorrow might hurt a little less.

I didn’t feel powerful.

I didn’t feel resilient.

I didn’t feel like someone who was accomplishing anything extraordinary.

I felt exhausted.

And for a long time, I thought exhaustion was evidence that I was failing.

Until that afternoon, sitting on the floor of my apartment, holding a letter I’d written to myself two years earlier.

I read the words of the woman who had sat on that beach in Mexico, dreaming about the life she wanted to create.

I remembered how hopeful she was. How proud she’d been of the courage it had already taken to leave behind everything familiar. How desperately she wanted to become someone who trusted herself, who lived authentically, who was free from the expectations and fears that had shaped so much of her life.

And I thought about everything she was about to endure.

All the nights she would cry. All the mornings she would wake up wishing she could feel like herself again. All the moments she would question whether she’d made a terrible mistake, whether her faith had been misplaced, whether she’d somehow lost the very person she’d worked so hard to become.

I felt so much tenderness for her that it almost hurt.

But then I looked around.

At the apartment I’d moved into six months earlier. At the life I’d created. At the freedom I now experienced so routinely that I’d almost forgotten how desperately I’d once wanted it.

I thought about the dreams I’d pursued. The decisions I’d made. The ways I’d continued building a life that reflected who I genuinely was, even when I was struggling to recognize that person.

And then I looked back at the letter.

At the woman who’d written it.

At everything she hoped I’d become.

And something inside me shifted.

Because for the first time in what felt like an extraordinarily long time, I wasn’t looking at myself through the lens of everything I thought was missing.

I wasn’t thinking about how much I’d struggled, how many times I’d fallen apart, how much further I thought I should have been.

I was looking at the woman who had actually lived through those two years.

The woman who had gotten herself out of bed when she didn’t know how she was going to face another day. Who had carried herself through circumstances she never could have anticipated. Who had continued working, creating, loving, hoping, and building a life even when she couldn’t imagine what that life might eventually become.

The woman who had questioned everything she believed and still found the courage to keep moving.

The woman who had been brought to her knees more times than she could count and had somehow managed to get back up every single time.

And suddenly, I understood something I hadn’t been able to see while I was living through it.

I had clawed my own way out of the depths of hell.

Me.

Not because the universe had finally revealed some magnificent plan. Not because someone had arrived to rescue me. Not because I’d discovered the perfect spiritual practice or finally learned how to surrender without resistance.

Because I had kept going.

Through every moment when I thought I couldn’t.

Through every morning when I wanted to disappear beneath the covers.

Through every day when I questioned whether any of the effort was worth it.

I had carried myself through all of it.

And I had been so consumed by how difficult the journey felt that I hadn’t recognized how extraordinary it was that I’d made it this far.

I sat there holding that letter, and I began to cry.

Not because everything suddenly made sense. Not because I’d finally found the answer to every question that had tormented me for the past two years.

But because I could finally see myself.

And I was so fucking proud of her.

I was proud of the woman who had written that letter, with all her beautiful hope and conviction, who had been brave enough to imagine a different life for herself.

But I was even prouder of the woman who was holding it.

Because she hadn’t simply imagined that life.

She had built it.

Through circumstances that would have been unimaginable to the woman sitting on that beach. Through pain that had made her question everything. Through days when simply surviving had required more strength than she believed she possessed.

She had become the woman she’d once dreamed of being.

And more.

Not because everything had unfolded the way she’d hoped. Not because she’d become immune to heartbreak or uncertainty. Not because she’d somehow mastered the art of being human.

But because she had discovered a depth of strength she never would have known she possessed if she hadn’t been forced to reach for it.

And because, despite everything, she had continued creating a life that the woman on that beach would have been overwhelmed to know was possible.

For two years, I’d been looking at myself and seeing someone who was struggling to become the person she used to be.

But the woman who wrote that letter wouldn’t have seen someone who was failing.

She would have seen someone who had survived things she couldn’t yet imagine.

Someone who had fought for her freedom, built a home, pursued her passions, and continued choosing a life that felt authentic even when the circumstances surrounding it were anything but easy.

Someone who had found a way to keep moving forward when she couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.

And I think she would have been astonished.

Not by how perfectly everything had turned out.

But by how much we’d managed to do while everything felt so impossibly difficult.

I sat there for a long time, thinking about the distance between those two women.

The one who had written the letter.

And the one who had survived everything that came after it.

And for the first time, I understood something about the butterfly that I’d never fully appreciated before.

A butterfly cannot see its own wings the way the rest of the world can.

It can inhabit them. It can use them. It can move through the world with an entirely different capacity than it possessed before.

But it cannot step outside itself and admire the extraordinary transformation that has occurred.

And perhaps neither can we.

Perhaps when we’re living through something that demands every ounce of strength we possess, we’re simply too close to our own experience to recognize what we’re becoming.

Perhaps we’re so consumed by the pain of losing what was that we cannot see what is taking shape in its place.

Perhaps we can spend years believing we’re standing still because we cannot see the destination, without realizing how far we’ve already traveled.

And perhaps sometimes it takes seeing ourselves through the eyes of the person we used to be to recognize what we’ve actually accomplished.

Because that’s what happened to me.

I didn’t find the light at the end of the tunnel.

I found a letter.

And in the words of a woman who had no idea what was coming, I finally recognized the woman who had fought her way through it.

I saw the life I’d created. The courage it had required. The extraordinary strength it had taken to keep building when I couldn’t see what I was building toward.

And I realized that while I’d spent so long waiting to emerge from the fire, I’d failed to recognize how much of the journey I’d already made.

That I’d been measuring my life by how much pain I was still carrying instead of recognizing everything I’d managed to carry myself through.

That I’d been so focused on the woman I thought I’d lost that I couldn’t see the woman who had survived.

And that somewhere along the way, through all the rage, the grief, the exhaustion, and the endless uncertainty, I’d become someone the woman on that beach would have been extraordinarily proud to know.

I don’t know why everything happened the way it did.

There are things I still wish had been different. Things I would never have chosen. Things I don’t need to romanticize or justify in order to acknowledge how profoundly they affected me.

And I don’t know whether every fire leads to something beautiful.

But I know now how easy it is to mistake the experience of burning for the absence of becoming.

How easy it is to believe you’re failing when you’re actually fighting harder than you ever have before.

How easy it is to overlook the extraordinary strength it takes to keep going when you cannot see where the journey ends.

And I know how long you can spend waiting for someone to show you the way out, without recognizing that you’ve been finding your own way all along.

I wish I could go back to that afternoon in Zihuatanejo.

I wish I could sit beside the woman writing that letter, with the Pacific Ocean roaring before her, and hold her for just a moment.

I wouldn’t tell her that everything was going to happen for a reason. I wouldn’t promise that the pain would eventually make sense or that every dream would unfold exactly as she’d imagined.

I wouldn’t tell her that the universe was preparing her for something greater.

I’d just tell her how proud I was of her.

For the courage it had already taken to begin again. For the hope she carried. For believing she was worthy of a life that felt authentically hers.

And I’d tell her that the next two years were going to be harder than anything she could possibly imagine.

That there would be moments when she would feel utterly defeated. When she’d question everything. When she’d lose sight of the person she was and wonder whether she’d ever find her way back.

But that somehow, through all of it, she would keep going.

And one day, in a home she hadn’t yet imagined, she’d find the words she’d written on that beach.

She’d remember who she was when she wrote them.

She’d think about everything she’d endured since.

And for the first time, she’d see herself the way that younger woman would have seen her.

Not as someone who was failing.

Not as someone who hadn’t healed quickly enough or accomplished enough or figured out how to make sense of everything.

But as someone who had survived.

Someone who had fought her way through the darkness and continued building a life she once could only dream of.

Someone who had been so consumed by the fire that she hadn’t noticed how far she’d come.

And in that moment, she’d finally see what had been there all along.

Her own wings.

The fire is here to set you free.

Even when you cannot yet see your wings.

From the embers, with love.