I choose growth

It’s so easy to choose what is safe and familiar.

Lately, life keeps taking me back to Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken; to that quiet image of a traveller standing before two roads, knowing that whichever one he chooses, there will always be another left behind.

Frost writes, “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” and somehow, standing at my own crossroads, the line feels less like poetry and more like a mirror.

If I ever wondered how something I read, studied or learned could find its way into real life, this would be one of those peculiar moments.

I’m in a strange place where much of what I once knew no longer exists, and I’m having to recreate, reimagine, perhaps even reinvent myself. Things I once thought I wanted have become lessons instead. The semicolon is loud, but thankfully, not permanent.

What continues to fascinate me is how we can accomplish so much and still question whether we are capable of what comes next. How quickly a title can become a limitation. How easily imposter syndrome can convince you that because you haven't done something before, you aren't equipped to do it now.

I’m at a crossroads.

The options are clear enough. One is familiar, and undoubtedly safer. The other looks like a career change, but perhaps only by virtue of its label. There is very little that application, curiosity and a willingness to learn cannot bridge.

Still, I hesitate.

There are the inevitable questions: What if I don't get it? What if I don't get it quickly enough? What if I'm in over my head?

Then I remind myself: I have been here before.

No media degree. No CARIMAC. Just someone who saw something in me, perhaps before I was able to see it clearly in myself, and decided to guide me.

Maybe that is what I am still learning; sometimes other people can see the capacity in us long before we have the language for it ourselves.

Perhaps the real superpower is not simply knowing what you can do, but eventually learning to see yourself the way the people who believe in you see you. Even the people who are intimidated by you. Especially then.

So here I am again, standing between two roads.

One offers familiarity. The other offers possibility.

And familiarity is tempting. It asks very little of you except that you remain who you have already been.

Growth asks something different.

It asks that I become willing to be a beginner again. To be taught. To be uncomfortable. To not always be the person in the room who knows the answer. To trust that not knowing yet is not the same as not being capable.

I have been rocked and stirred, tilted, poured out and tossed around in this season. I have had to find my footing more than once.

Perhaps this is not another beginning so much as another becoming.

Frost's traveller eventually reflects that the road he took “has made all the difference.”

I don't know yet what this road will make of me.

But I know I don't want to choose a path simply because I already know it.

So, at this crossroads, with all the uncertainty that comes with choosing something new, I am choosing the road that asks more of me.

Im choosing growth .