What if this chapter isn't the whole story?

There are seasons of our lives when all we can see is what's directly in front of us.

When you're afraid, that view can get exponentially smaller. Your attention narrows swiftly around the thing that hurts, what needs fixing, or what you desperately want an answer to. It's hard to imagine that life could be moving anywhere when you're using so much of your energy just trying to make it through right where you are.

I was thinking about this while walking through the woods with my friend M. A light rain was falling, mostly catching in the canopy above us and tapping against the lush green leaves as we walked.

We had nearly a year's worth of life to fit into a few miles, and as M started filling in the space between then and now, I found myself seeing connections in her story that moved me deeply.

July didn't know about November

The last time I'd seen M, she had recently lived through a long stretch of unemployment. She'd been laid off in July and didn't find another role until November.

We can say that now because we have the privilege of knowing when the story changed. M didn't. 💔

When she was laid off in July, there wasn't a date circled on the calendar telling her that she'd have a job in November. She had no idea whether she'd be unemployed for four months or fourteen. She simply knew that the income she'd relied on had disappeared, and the savings she'd worked hard to build were slowly becoming the money she needed to live on.

August arrived without the certainty she wanted, followed by September and October. I think that's important to sit with for a minute because four months feels very different when you know how the story ends.

M had to live those months without that certainty. And as the ambiguity stretched on, fear started finding old stories to latch onto.

You're impulsive. You spend too much. You should know better.

Almost a year later, some of those same feelings came rushing back when M saw a tax form from the time she'd worked as an independent contractor and realized she might owe more than she'd anticipated.

Money work is one of my jams, so while we walked, I asked if she'd be open to trying something with me.

I invited her to return to the moment when she'd seen the form and notice what happened in her body before her mind had a chance to turn the experience into a judgment about herself.

She felt it in her gut. "What color is it?" I asked.

"Yellow," she said.

Then I asked her to imagine that color changing into something that felt really goooood in her body.

"Sky blue!" she responded.

"Awesome! And what does sky blue feel like to you?"

She paused for a moment, and then the words came: freedom, possibility, and calm.

We kept walking beneath the trees, following the feeling and the stories attached to it farther back until eventually we arrived at her father.

M was seventeen when her dad went back home to the light. She lost someone who had represented support and stability while she was still learning what those things felt like. That loss became woven into the ways she learned to create security for herself and much of what she would later experience in relationships with men.

As M talked, I started thinking about what had actually been happening during those months when she was so afraid about money.

Her brother developed sepsis and spent two months in the hospital, and M was able to show up for him. Her best friend's body was being consumed by cancer, and she had the time to be present during the final days of her life. 😭

There she was, worrying about why she didn't have a job while her life kept placing her beside people she loved during moments when her presence truly mattered.

I don't say that to make the layoff beautiful. M was scared. She needed income, and watching your savings shrink when you don't know when another paycheck is coming can make your entire world feel completely unstable.

She couldn't have known in July that those empty spaces on her calendar would eventually become hospital visits and final days with someone she loved. Looking back, she feels grateful for having the space when those moments arrived.

And I wonder how many times something like this happens in our lives without us being able to recognize it yet.

Something changes that we never would've chosen. A structure we depended on disappears, or the future we thought we were moving toward suddenly shifts, and our minds immediately start trying to claw our way back to known solid ground.

Meanwhile, life may be opening experiences we couldn't have planned our way into. Circumstances can call forward capacities we haven't had reason to discover yet, or create enough space for a person, question, or desire to enter our awareness.

Sometimes I wonder if there are parts of ourselves we came here to meet that can only become visible once life changes enough to introduce us to them.

Then something surfaced

During M's unemployment, she found herself craving community and eventually reconnected with a woman who had been a spiritual advisor to her before. This woman held space for M while so much of her life felt uncertain, and during one of their conversations she asked a gorgeous question.

"What do you think you would really love to do?"

M told me that the answer bubbled up from inside her.

"I think I want to volunteer for hospice."

I swear, something in me lit up when she shared that! This woman hadn't told M what her purpose was or handed her an interpretation of everything she'd been through. She gave M enough space to hear herself.

And what surfaced was hospice. 🥹

If we pause here for a second, this is a woman who lost her father at seventeen. During her unemployment, she'd spent two months showing up while her brother battled sepsis and had accompanied her best friend through the final days of her life.

Now someone was asking what she genuinely wanted to do, and the answer that came from within her was to sit with people who were dying.

M didn't know where that desire would lead. She only knew it was there, so she followed that tug on her heartstrings.

The last time we'd seen each other, she was beginning a new job with a major educational publishing company. Soon afterward, she asked me to write a reccomendation for her hospice application.

She got in!! :)

Now M volunteers weekly, spending time with people who are approaching the end of their lives. Next month, she's considering attending a community class where she can begin learning about becoming a death doula.

When she tells people about her hospice work, she often watches their faces scrunch or their bodies recoil at the thought of being that close to death.

But for M, being there feels oddly natural.

As we walked beneath the trees with the rain still tapping above us, her story kept circling in my mind.

The seventeen-year-old girl who lost her father couldn't know what that experience would mean to the woman walking beside me all these years later. M couldn't have known, while sitting beside her brother in the hospital or saying goodbye to her best friend, that one day someone would ask what she really wanted and hospice would rise from within her.

As one experience led into another, M was discovering something about who she was and what felt deeply natural to her. And none of this was visible when she was sitting at home worrying about her savings. She could only live the piece of the story she had access to.

So I asked her something. "If you could go back to last July and give that version of yourself advice, what would you tell her?"

M looked at me with light in her eyes.

"I would tell myself to trust the unfolding of my life."

😭😭😭

I felt that one.

She can say it now from a place she couldn't see back then. She knows November exists and that the job eventually came. She knows what filled some of those frightening months of unemployment and where one of those experiences eventually led her.

She's also gotten to meet more of herself along the way. And there was still more she was about to show me.

And then she told me about Mary

One of M's hospice clients was a beautiful woman named Mary.

Mary left the Earth plane last week.

She had been living in memory care at the hospice center, and during her lucid moments she would tell M stories about her children and her life. As M told me about her, I noticed her voice soften when she started talking about Mary's husband.

Toward the end of Mary's life, her body was deteriorating and she would often drool, so her husband always had a fresh towel ready for her.

Before M came to visit, he also made sure Mary's favorite lipstick was on. 😭

There was something in the way M told me these details that made me curious, so I asked her, "What is it about that that moves you so much?"

"It's hard to articulate ..." she said.

Then she took this big breath in, closed her eyes, and placed her hand over her heart. I watched her face relax as she searched for the thing she already seemed to feel.

"It's the devotion."

There it was. I could see the light in her eyes again, and my God, did I understand why those little acts had touched her heart.

This man had known Mary long enough to know the shade she loved on her lips. As her body changed, he was still tending to the details that helped her feel like herself. There was such tenderness in knowing what she needed without waiting to be asked.

And M had been allowed to witness that. 🥹

This woman who lost her father at seventeen, whose marriage eventually ended in divorce, and who has spent years learning what she desires in partnership had been sitting close enough to Mary and her husband to witness this incredibly intimate expression of love.

The thing her body responded to was devotion.

Naturally, we moved into the area of love

We kept walking, and as you can imagine after meeting Mary, our conversation moved into dating.

M has started opening herself to meeting someone again, and she'd recently been spending time with a man who tells her he knows she's a wonderful woman.

As she got to know him, though, she started noticing what happened when they were together.

He didn't ask very much about her. When she offered pieces of herself, he rarely followed the thread. She could feel how much she wanted to experience a relationship where someone was genuinely curious about the world inside her.

As we went deeper, I asked her what was really bothering her about this experience. And it felt like years of emotions and memories rose with her answer.

"I don't want to prove that I'm worthy of being seen."

I asked her to say it again. She did, and I watched her back straighten.

So I asked her to say it one more time.

"I don't want to prove that I'M WORTHY of being seen."

Something had changed in her voice.

It was one of those moments where you can almost watch a person encounter their own truth in real time. She was hearing herself say something her body seemed completely ready to believe.

And immediately, I thought about Mary and her lipstick.

M had been sitting beside a relationship where attention lived in the details, and here she was recognizing how deeply she wanted to feel known in her own life. There was something about witnessing that kind of devotion that seemed to expand what she could imagine for herself.

On the way back

We tend to recognize the architecture of our lives much more easily when we're looking backward because we finally have enough information to understand how experiences that once seemed unrelated became connected. 🧩

M can do that now.

She can look back at the months she spent unemployed and see how much life was happening while she was terrified that hers had stalled. Her experiences brought her closer to questions of death, presence, service, love, security, partnership, and the kind of woman she's becoming. Following what felt true led her into hospice, where the people she met continued showing her something about what matters to her.

None of these moments arrived with an explanation of what they would eventually mean.

M didn't have November when she was living through July.

She didn't know when another job would come or how much farther into her savings she would have to go into before it did. From where she stood then, she couldn't see hospice or Mary. She didn't know that a desire to work with people approaching death would bubble up from within her, or that one day she'd stand in the woods telling me about a tube of lipstick and finally finding the word for the kind of love that makes her heart soar.

This is why I wanted to share her story with you.

There are experiences I would never ask someone to explain through purpose or meaning. I don't believe we need to make pain beautiful before we're allowed to trust our lives. Grief gets to be grief. Losing someone we love can crack our whole world open, and financial uncertainty can make the future feel terrifyingly dark and small.

Still, M's story has me wondering what becomes possible when fear isn't the only voice interpreting what's happening to us.

When life no longer resembles the picture we had in our minds, it's so easy to believe something has gone wrong. We want certainty again, especially when we're hurting, and we can become so focused on getting out of the experience that there's very little space to notice what else might be stirring within it.

I think I want to leave a little more space for the possibility that I don't have enough information yet.

Instead of rushing to decide what an experience means, I want to stay curious about what might emerge within the gap between where I am and whatever comes next. An unexpected desire might surface. An experience might reveal something about who I am.

I want to give my life the chance to surprise me. 😍

Because M's story reminded me that we can be deeply afraid of where we are and still have no idea what's becoming possible from there.

Maybe that's part of trusting our lives: staying close enough to ourselves to hear what feels true and allowing that truth to guide the next step, even when we can't see where it leads.

M still doesn't know where hospice will take her, whether she'll become a death doula, or who she'll eventually share her life with. Her story is still being written.

But she can look back at the woman who was scared in July and offer her something she couldn't have known then.

"I would tell myself to trust the unfolding of my life."

She can say that now because she has November.

I think I'll remember that the next time I'm afraid the chapter I'm in is the whole story, because it makes me wonder what might already be finding its way toward us that we simply can't see yet.