I spent twelve-plus years writing This Time I Dance! Creating the Work You Love, without an agent, publisher, or writing mentor in sight. I spent years feeling bad because I wasn’t done with it. I watched others whiz by in their perfect neat lives, crisp definitions, and big fat paychecks and I felt foolish, foolish because I was in the middle of things. I faced self-doubt every day, but I chose self-love in the end. I decided to stay true to myself even if that looked as though I would walk for years through the deep blue sea. I wanted to follow my own instincts, hold my own hand, and see where that led me in the end. It’s led me here, a time in my life where I am so unbelievably grateful for all those essential “middle moments,” all those experiences that shaped me, fed me, grew me, and made me what I am—and what I have always been meant to be. In This Time I Dance!, I said, “It takes a hero’s journey to create a hero,” and I’ll say it again. Those middle moments are our ashrams, boot camps, graduate schools, and launch pads. They are anything but useless, empty, or ordinary.
The middle of things is where change takes place, where the great big barge of how things have always been turns around in the ocean and goes a new way. It’s slower than a long red light, but it doesn’t take place forever.
The real heroes are in the middle of things, sweating in the middle of the night alone, doubting the future, crying the tears of self-doubt, burning holes in the ground with their mad desire to flee. Celebrate these ones, the ones who are making choices right now that others will not see. Celebrate these ones who dare to make uncelebrated choices. Celebrate yourself, right now as though you are the biggest winner of all time, because you are dear one, you are. You are sticking with the wonderful and terrible confusion of creating an authentic life.
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