I’m all a-flutter. That is what the gracious ladies of the South called it, this feeling, this sense of being stitched to a butterfly’s wings, eyes wheeling and hands flapping, trying to regain your center and call your world to order. But I do not flit and sigh and wring my hands. Rather, I am very still and quiet as I survey the dust motes of my life, floating, hanging suspended where I flung them.
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I finally made public my decision to resign. And I wrote the letter to B____ and watched Kelsey tuck it into her bag to mail for me.
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Oh, goodness. My, aren’t we bold.
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I am standing on that precipice, hearing the wind pick up. I’ve come out from every other person and every other faith and am fully exposed on the crag. I am so alone in this decision, the only one ready to pay the price. And even though those I’ve told support me in this, they offer that support because my conviction has already set that this is what I need to do. That support of necessity is of a different mold than true support. I breathe deep in the longing for someone to look in my eyes, see deep enough to know what they’re saying and tell me, “I know you did the right thing. It’s all going to work out, I know it.”
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My parents will find out soon from my Facebook post that I resigned. I breathe. I wait. I do not tell them of this process because they will not agree. And practical people that they are, they will urge me with renewed vigor to pick up the job search out of desperation. And I will falter. I cannot afford to feel bad, I cannot believe that I am that adrift that I must grasp for any bleached piece of driftwood. If I listen to them, then the fate they so fear will be upon me and I’ll lose everything.
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Oh, God, I have really done it now. I have risked everything, my livelihood, my home, my heart, my future, my very life. This is what it feels like to throw it all in the fire and to see what will come out. I have thrown my self in the there, too. This is what it feels like to do all you have feared, all at once – completely sure you’ve done what you had to because there was no other course of action you could live with, and totally terrified.
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One way or another, my life is utterly changed now. And I will never go back. And now I’m off the land, off the shore of my home country. I’m free-falling. I’ve jumped to my death. This is my suicide note. This is the death of my old life, the death of the ordinary day, the safe choices, the banked hopes. I’ve withdrawn all my dreams and am throwing them in the street.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
-- Winston Churchill
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