“ I know what it feels like to know that you were brave once... but that you haven’ t been brave again in a really long time.”
I remember the red creeping up my neck, jumping the hard perimeter of my jawbone, and consuming the flesh of my cheeks in an instant. I remember how it was somehow both hot and icy-stinging chill at the same time, like a controlled burn setting wildfire to a hornet’ s nest. Where you’ re not really sure if it’ s the flames or the venom that will kill you first.
I remember how I could taste the adrenaline on my tongue, bitter like battery acid, acrid like two-day-old underarm sweat. It rushed in from the wild- eyed animal parts of my brain, a fight-or-flight flood of survival chemicals that saturated every fiber of my being, made every muscle twitch and ready itself to run.
I know what it feels like to know that you were brave once... but that you haven’ t been brave again in a really long time.
For some of us, that last big leap we can remember taking had to have been somewhere around the time we took those first few tentative, wobbly steps when we were little. But a hard face-plant early in life quickly taught us that it was safer to just sit still where you are than to continue trying to gain any important ground at all. This group becomes the people who believe it is better to hide in plain sight than to risk falling flat on your face in front of everyone ever again.
For others of us, though, we leaped again later in life.
And we somehow stuck the landing.
Sitting in that blur of a vacant room, I knew that I had been incredibly brave once. I had leaped, believing the net would appear( which is just terrible aeronautics advice, by the way— it’ s the Schrödinger’ s Cat * of goal-chasing).
And that time I had been caught gloriously on the way down. Cirque du Soleil style. Fate had grabbed me by the hands in a tight wristlock and flung me in a triple somersault all the way back up to this highwire act of every dream I had been chasing.
“ I know what it feels like to know that you were brave once... but that you haven’ t been brave again in a really long time.”
And I guess I just thought from that moment on... life would always feel this way.
* In the Schrödinger’ s Cat experiment, a cat is placed inside a box with a radioactive atom and some poison that may kill it, but we are not sure. So long as we don’ t look in the box, the cat’ s fate can be both dead and alive to us at the same time. It’ s the same thing with the net. It might appear, it might not. And the only way to find out for sure is on the way down. Except in that scenario, we run the risk of becoming the dead cat.
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