Fifteen minutes into the podcast, I told the host I was nervous.
We were recording an interview about the book. Two hours, on camera, about the years in India, the guru, the grief that sent me there at twenty-one. The kind of conversation I have wanted for a long time. And from the moment we started, my chest was fluttering.
Not the useful kind of nervous. The old kind. The kind where some part of me starts scanning the room for how to look like I have it together.
For most of my life I would have overridden it. Breathed it down. Performed the calm, capable version of myself until the feeling went quiet. I am good at that. I built a whole self out of being good at that.
This time I said it out loud. I told him I was anxious, and then I kept feeling it. The flutter stayed. I didn't talk it away or wait it out. I let it sit there in my chest while we talked, like a third person in the room.
There is a line they used to feed us in the yoga world. Do your practice and all is coming. The promise underneath it was that a day would arrive. Practice enough, heal enough, arrive, and the flutter would be gone for good. I would finally feel like I was enough.
That day does not come. I am fifty-two and I can tell you it does not come. The anxiety did not leave. What changed is that I was in relationship to it instead of at war with it. I felt it the whole time, and I talked anyway.
So many of us are waiting for the version of ourselves that no longer feels the flutter. The one who has finally handled it. We treat the feeling as the thing between us and enough, and we override it to get there faster. I'm not waiting for it to stop anymore.