What do you have to lose?

I'm writing this on a Sunday. Years ago that sentence would have meant something specific. Sunday was the whole point, the day everything pointed at, and I'd have spent it on a platform with a microphone, certain I was doing the one thing I was put here to do. This Sunday, I made coffee in a café my husband and I own with some of our best mates, came home, and sat down to write about how to leave the thing I was once so sure of. If you'd described this life to the girl I was, she wouldn't have recognised it as a life. She'd have recognised it as the warning. The cautionary tale they told about people who let go.

She had the whole map. That was the thing about her, the certainty. She knew exactly what her life would cost and exactly what it would buy, and she knew, with the particular confidence of someone who has never once been wrong out loud, precisely what she'd lose if she ever stepped off the marked path. She'd have listed it for you without pausing. The calling. The certainty itself. The approval of everyone who mattered. The sense that God was pleased. Her place at the centre of the only world she knew. Lose those, she'd have told you, and you've lost everything worth having.

So here's what I want to report back to her, from inside the life she was so afraid of.

I did lose some of it. Not all, but a lot. The certainty went first and never came back, and I've stopped waiting for it. The approval went when I started saying things the old world couldn't forgive. The place at the centre, the platform, the role I'd built my entire self around, all gone. By her maths, I'm the disaster she spent her girlhood bracing against.

But the maths was wrong, the way it's been wrong all along. Some of what she was so frightened to lose, I never lost at all. The love is still here. More of it, and the real kind, the kind that stayed when the truth came out. The sense of the sacred didn't leave when the certainty did. It just stopped living in a building and started turning up everywhere else, in the steam off the coffee, the late puzzle on the table, the particular quiet of this room on a Sunday. And the longing to matter, to make some difference with my one life, that walked straight out the door behind me and found better work to do out here than it was ever allowed to do in there. Those things were mine. They came with me. They were never the system's to keep.

The rest, the things I actually did lose, I've slowly realised I don't miss the way she was so sure I would. The certainty was heavy. The approval was a leash. The place at the centre was a cage with very good lighting. She thought they were treasure. They were weight. Setting them down didn't empty my life. It let me stand up straight for the first time.

I won't pretend I know what she'd make of me. Some days I think she'd be relieved, like something in her had been holding its breath for thirty years and could finally let it out. Other days I think she'd be frightened of me, of how much I've put down, of how little I now defend. Maybe she'd be disappointed. Maybe all three at once. I'm not going to tidy that up. She doesn't have to approve of me for me to be telling her the truth.

Marilynne Robinson, in Gilead, says it the way I would if I were a better writer. A dying man, writing to his small son about what living was actually worth, tells him:

"There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient."

That's the part the girl with the map couldn't have known. She thought there was one reason, one path, one life that counted, and everything else was loss. From here I can see there were a thousand thousand, every one of them enough, and most of them waiting on the far side of the line she was most afraid to cross.

This is not less than I was promised. It's more. It just arrived in a shape I'd been taught to mistake for failure.

So let me say the thing plainly, because this is the centre of it and it doesn't want decoration.

The life on the far side of the loss you were so afraid of is not a consolation prize.

It is not the lesser thing you settle for when the real life falls through. Not the runner-up. Not the sad, smaller existence they warned you about, the one you accept because you blew your shot at the proper one. You were taught to expect exactly that. You were taught that out here, past the edge of the approved life, there's only diminishment, a person making do, telling herself she's fine. So even when you got here and found it was good, some part of you kept treating the good as a fluke. Kept apologising for it. Kept half-believing you'd taken the downgrade and were just being brave about it.

You didn't take the downgrade. This is the real thing. This is the life your hunger was actually for, the whole time it was being told to want something else.

Derek Walcott ends a poem about coming home to yourself with three words that took me years to be able to receive. Not endure. Receive.

"Feast on your life."

Not pick at it. Not ration it. Not sit at the table of your own existence apologising for being there. Feast. As though it were a banquet and not a punishment, because that's what it is, and that's what it always was, underneath the story that taught you to fear it.

You braced for the consolation prize. You were handed your actual life.

Liz. Xo