Peace by Piece

However you believe you got here.

Whether you believe a God who knew you before you were formed placed you deliberately and purposefully on this earth. Whether you believe in a universe that conspired across billions of years to produce exactly this specific version of you. Whether you believe in the science of it — the atoms and the biology and the extraordinary statistical improbability of any single human being existing at all. Whether your belief sits somewhere in between all of those things or somewhere outside of them entirely.

However you got here — you got here. You exist. You are here. And nothing about the circumstances that brought you here was small.

So let me ask you something.

How did you end up living like you were?

NOBODY WAS PLACED HERE TO BE SMALL

I want to say this as plainly as I know how because I think it is one of the most important things I can say across any of these pages. 

Nobody — not one single person on this earth — was placed here to be small.

Not you. Not the version of you that has spent years making yourself smaller so someone else could feel bigger. Not the version of you that absorbed the message — delivered in a hundred small ways across a thousand ordinary moments — that you were too much, or not enough, or that your ideas were impractical, or that your dreams were naive, or that who you were was somehow a problem to be managed rather than a person to be celebrated.

Not that version of you. And not the real version underneath her either.

You were placed here — however you believe that placing happened — with a specific configuration of gifts and passions and perspectives and ways of seeing the world that belong only to you. That have never existed before in quite this combination. That will never exist again after you. The particular way your mind works. The particular things that light you up. The particular problems you can see solutions to that other people walk past without noticing. The particular way you love and the particular way you persevere and the particular way you get back up.

All of that is not accidental. All of that is not small. And none of it — not one piece of it — was diminished by what you went through. It was tested. It was pressured. It was buried under years of surviving something that required all of your energy. But it was not destroyed.

It is still there.

And it is time to start treating it accordingly.

THE QUESTION OF STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES

I want to talk about this honestly because I think the way we are taught to think about strengths and weaknesses does us a disservice.

We are taught to identify our weaknesses and fix them. To shore up the gaps. To become more well-rounded. To work on the things we are not naturally good at until we are at least adequately competent at them.

And while I understand the logic of that I want to offer you a different frame.

What if the goal is not to eliminate your weaknesses but to understand them clearly enough that you stop expecting yourself to be strong in every area — and start finding people whose strengths fill the gaps where yours run thin?

Because here is what I have come to understand. The people who do the most extraordinary things in this world are almost never the most well-rounded people in the room. They are the people who know exactly what they are exceptional at and who have built teams and relationships and collaborations around people who are exceptional at the things they are not.

Your weaknesses are not failures. They are simply the places where someone else’s strength is needed. And recognising that — honestly, without shame, without the feeling that you are supposed to be able to do everything yourself — is one of the most practically useful things you can do.

Know what you are good at. Really good at. Not just competent at — genuinely gifted at. The things that come easily to you that others find difficult. The things you do that make people say how did you do that so quickly. The things that absorb you completely when you are doing them because they feel like home.

Those are your strengths. And they are worth far more than you have probably been told.

Now know your weaknesses with the same honesty. Not with shame. With clarity. These are the places I run thin. These are the things I struggle with. These are the areas where I need support rather than solo effort. And then — and this is the important part — go find the people who are strong in those areas. Who light up doing the things you find draining. Whose gifts complement yours rather than duplicate them.

The right people make you bigger. Not by doing your work for you. But by doing their work alongside you in a way that frees you to do yours.

THE QUESTION OF PASSION

I want to ask you something and I want you to sit with it genuinely rather than answering it quickly.

What lights you up.

Not what you are good at. Not what pays well. Not what other people think you should be doing or what makes practical sense or what is the responsible choice. What actually, genuinely, when you are doing it or thinking about it or reading about it or talking about it — lights you up.

That thing. Whatever it is. However impractical it sounds. However far it feels from where you currently are. That thing matters. It is not an accident that it lights you up. It is information. It is a signal pointing toward something that is specifically yours to do in this world.

Now here is the interesting question. Do your passions and your strengths align?

Sometimes they do. Sometimes the thing you love most is also the thing you are most naturally gifted at. And when that happens it is not a coincidence — it is a compass pointing very clearly toward what you are here to do.

Sometimes they do not align perfectly. Sometimes you are passionate about something you are not yet skilled at — and that is not a reason to abandon the passion, it is a reason to develop the skill. And sometimes you are skilled at something that does not particularly light you up — and that is useful information too. Because spending your life doing something you are good at – but that does not move you – is a particular kind of slow diminishment that deserves to be named as such.

The sweet spot — the place where your strengths and your passions overlap — that is where your most meaningful work lives. That is the territory worth mapping and returning to and building toward even when the path there is not direct.

ON FAILURE

I want to say something about failure because I think the fear of it is one of the things that keeps the most capable people the smallest.

Failing at something does not make you a failure. It makes you someone who tried. And trying — genuinely, with your whole self, at something that matters to you — is one of the most courageous things a human being can do. Especially when the trying is public. Especially when the outcome is uncertain. Especially when you have already been through enough that the risk of trying and not succeeding feels like more than you can add to an already heavy load.

I started this blog knowing it might reach nobody. Knowing that the ideas I had shared with people over the years had been shut down more times than I could count. Knowing that the same inner voice that has always tried to convince me to wait, to hesitate, to be more certain before I begin, would say all of its familiar things about this too.

I started it anyway.

Not because I was certain it would succeed. But because I was done waiting for certainty before I began. Because the ideas that other people shut down in me kept becoming things that other people did — and I was finished sitting back and watching that happen. Because this story was mine to tell and I had been waiting long enough to tell it.

I still do not know where this will land up. What I have come to realise is that it has  unexpectedly become a full time job, one that I am not financially able to continue with. Where I am at in this moment, right now, while checking through this post to upload it, my next task is to apply for jobs, because income unfortunately does not happen by osmosis. This is a very bitter sweet moment in time for me. There is so much more I had hoped to achieve and complete before it came to this, and I will continue to upload as much as I am able to before I go back to full time employment, because I do still believe in what I want to do, I am still passionate about it, it is sadly just not in a position where work is a choice. And this is too much of a monumental task to be just a hobby. 

Which brings me to: Failure is not the opposite of success. Trying and failing is infinitely preferable to never trying. Because trying gives you information. Trying builds skill. Trying puts you in the arena rather than in the stands. And the people who eventually do extraordinary things are almost never the people who got it right the first time. They are the people who got it wrong enough times to eventually understand how to get it right. I am so incredibly proud of the things I have learnt over the past few months, the new skill set I have acquired, the experience I have gained, the posts I have managed to fine tune and get up and running. 

Try the thing. Write the book. Start the business. Make the thing you have been thinking about making. Apply for the position. Have the conversation. Take the step.

And if it does not work the first time — or the second, or the third — try again. Because you are here. And you are capable. And the world needs what only you specifically can bring to it.

That is not motivational rhetoric. That is simply true.

ON BELIEVING IN YOURSELF WHEN OTHERS DO NOT

I want to say something about this because I have lived it and I know how hard it is.

Not everyone is going to believe in you. Not everyone is going to see what you are capable of. Some people — people who love you, people whose opinions you value — will look at your ideas and see risk rather than potential. Will look at your plans and see impracticality rather than possibility. Will look at you and see the you they have always known rather than the you you are becoming.

That is not always malice. Sometimes it is fear — their fear, about their own lives, projected onto yours. Sometimes it is genuine concern wrapped in the wrong delivery. Sometimes it is simply the limitation of their own vision — they cannot see what you can see because they are not standing where you are standing.

And sometimes — this is the one that stings most — it is the person who benefited from your smallness not wanting you to become big. Because your bigness disrupts the arrangement. Because your believing in yourself threatens the dynamic that required you not to.  And this is a story I know too well. 

None of that is your problem to manage.

Here is what I know for certain. The belief that matters most is yours. Not the belief of the people around you — though finding people who believe in you and who draw the best out of you is one of the most important things you can do and I will come back to that. But yours first. Your belief in yourself is the foundation. Everything else is built on top of it.

And if you do not yet have that belief fully — if it has been knocked about by years of being made to feel small, by the voices that said your ideas were impractical, by the person who needed you not to shine too brightly — then building it back is the work. Not quickly and not all at once. But deliberately. One small act of trusting yourself at a time. One small risk taken in the direction of something you care about. One day at a time of choosing to believe that what is in you is worth bringing out.

That belief, rebuilt from the inside, is unshakeable in a way that borrowed belief never is. Because it does not depend on anyone else’s opinion of you. It just depends on you knowing yourself clearly enough to trust what you know.

FIND YOUR PEOPLE

I said I would come back to this and I want to.

Find the people who make you bigger.

Not the people who need you small. Not the people whose comfort depends on you not outshining them. Not the people who respond to your ideas with all the reasons they will not work. Not the people who love you in theory but flinch when you start to actually become.

Find the people who lean forward when you talk about what you care about. Who ask questions that open things up rather than close them down. Who celebrate your wins without resentment and sit with you in your losses – without using them as evidence against you. Who see something in you that they want to draw out rather than something in you they need to contain.

Those people exist. They may not be in your immediate circle right now. They may be in communities you have not yet found, in industries you have not yet entered, in the rooms you will walk into when you take the next step toward the thing you are building.

Go find them. Because the company you keep shapes what you believe is possible. Surround yourself with people who are doing big things — not to compare yourself to them, but to remind yourself that big things are possible. That the gap between where you are and where you want to be has been crossed before by people who started exactly where you are starting.

Find the people whose strengths fill your gaps and whose gaps your strengths fill. Build something with them. Create something with them. Let their belief in what you can do together be part of what carries you when your own belief is running low.

You do not have to do this alone. You were never supposed to do this alone.

YOU ARE NOT TOO LATE

I want to say this for the women reading this who are on the other side of years of surviving something. Who are looking at the life they have been living and calculating the years that went into it and wondering whether there is enough time left to build something that feels like theirs.

There is.

The years you gave to loving someone through addiction were not wasted years even when they felt like they were. They made you something. They gave you a depth of understanding of human nature and human suffering and human resilience that cannot be taught and cannot be faked and is extraordinarily valuable in every context where human beings gather to do meaningful things together.

You know things most people do not know. You have survived things most people have not survived. You have capacities — for compassion, for perseverance, for finding lightness in darkness, for getting back up — that were forged in conditions that most people will never face.

That is not nothing. That is extraordinary raw material for an extraordinary second chapter.

You are not too late. You are exactly on time for what comes next.

Now go find out what that is.

And then go do it.

All of it.

As big as it was always supposed to be.