When You Decide The Story Is Over

There is a particular kind of stuck that looks like searching. You sit with the same question night after night, turning it over, waiting for it to hand you the next line. What happens now? Why did it happen this way? What am I supposed to do with what is left of me? And the question feels like progress because at least you are asking it, but a question you keep asking without ever reaching for the answer is not progress. It is just a very articulate way of staying exactly where you are.

I know that kind of stuck. I have sat inside my own questions long enough to memorize the wallpaper.

So here is what I had to learn: faith is not the absence of the question. Faith is what you choose to do while the question is still open. Fear keeps you circling it, asking it again in a slightly different voice, hoping it answers itself this time. Faith picks up the pen anyway. Not because the not knowing stopped, but because you decided the not knowing was no longer allowed to write the next page for you.

That is the real difference between the woman wallowing and the woman becoming. Wallowing asks the question and waits. Becoming asks the question and moves.

And moving does not require an answer first. It only requires a direction. A thought that carries you back toward what happened is not wrong; it is honest, it is real, and it is also not the only direction available to you. There is a thought sitting right next to it that carries you forward instead, toward what you are choosing rather than what was done to you, and you get to decide, every single day, which one you follow with your attention. That decision is smaller than people make it sound. It's not a leap. It's a lean. Lean toward the thought that is still writing something, instead of the one that already finished the story and just keeps rereading it.

I am not who I was, and I want to be honest that I am also not finished becoming who I am. That used to embarrass me, the not-finished part, like I owed someone a completed woman by now. I don't owe anyone that. Becoming is not a delay before the real version of you shows up. Becoming is the real version of you, mid-sentence, still being written, and choosing faith over fear simply means you keep writing the sentence instead of closing the book because you cannot see how it ends yet.

What happens if I keep walking and I still don't know how this turns out?

You do not have to know how the story ends to know which direction you are walking in. That is the whole of it. That is faith, plainly, without the church language wrapped around it if you do not want it wrapped around it: choosing to keep moving toward the life you want before you have proof it is coming.

I used to think reaching for the answer meant I had no clue. Now I understand reaching just means moving your hand toward something, even while it is still out of reach, even while your fingers are still finding its shape in the dark.

I am not the woman who sits with her questions until they calcify into a permanent address.

I am the woman who leans toward faith on the days fear is louder, and who keeps her hand moving across the page even when she cannot yet see where the sentence is going to land.