Sometimes I lose my voice.

Probably not in the way you are thinking right now. Some days, that voice inside seems to just drift away. For a little while now, it was speaking to me in other ways and asking me not to write. It was asking me for a different type of attention, a much more hidden and personal life than I show here.

What you see in front of you now is only a tiny fraction of what’s actually happening with me. It’s not that I couldn’t tell you what is happening, but it’s moving so quickly at times and theres so much that after about 10,000 words I would want to scrap what I wrote anyways and get back to the matter at hand.

My voice left.

And then it came back.

This has probably been the most bizarre month of my life since I can remember. I say bizarre not because of the things that have happened, but what has happened to me throughout the weeks.

I’ve changed.

I’ve changed in ways that I’m still not even comprehending. The butterfly that would once get knocked around in the wind turned into a rock and I feel as if I’ve landed right where I need to be. I’ve not only landed, but I’ve grown roots deep down into the ground and there’s this deep sense of belonging and purpose that is far beyond anything I’ve really experienced before. More than that, the chaos that has been this month sent me down a rabbit hole powered by trust and faith that literally showed me a lit path that I needed to take.

Needed to take – interesting huh?

More like being pulled.

Pulled by this force that I can’t really describe to you but I’m sure you get the gist of that type of feeling. The truth is I can feel something coming, but it’s not coming at me, it’s actually building behind me. Like a wave. A wave that I had a healer point out to me that I will ride all the way to the end and be just fine. This wave I’m talking about is something I saw coming a long time ago but now I feel it. I feel it picking up momentum and getting ready to crest.

When that happens, I can only begin to imagine what’s going to happen with all of this.

But I was talking about how I’ve changed, not what has been happening around me right? And here’s the thing, the ways I’ve gone about being in this time period are far far different than anything I’ve ever done before. Mostly, I attribute it to holding multiple things as “true” despite their contradictory nature.

How could you have dark and light in the same moment? Chaos and complete stillness?

That’s something that would have rocked my world a year ago but now it doesn’t seem so far off from being completely and utterly true. I’m in these moments that would have ripped me apart at one point in my life and now…they are healing me?

They are healing me. 

The only way I’ve been able to describe it to anyone is having a wound that gets torn open again but now you actually have what it takes to make sure it heals over properly. When I look back on everything I’m starting to see those moments in my life (the dots) and the paths that are connecting them (the lines). I see things as they were and not as I thought them to be. I see many things that at one point in time I would never have been able to see before.

Blind spots are no longer blind spots.

But I promise you, I am far from doing this on my own. The reality is I have an incredible network of people surrounding who are constantly feeding me energy and are asking as sounding boards for me. I stopped doing this all on my own an instead allowed myself to jump into a net of people who are all looking out for me. Truly, I am interweaving strong networks of support into my life – and that’s also changing me.

As grounded as I am right now, I leave the changing part of my life completely fluid. There are pieces of me that are foundational but I never really know exactly what I’m going to be like the next day. I leave that completely up to whatever “is” looking after me. Truth is, as strange as things have been, I know that this is also where I’m supposed to be. I’ve stopped isn’t it or shouldn’t be like this. I guess I’ve just come to accept things exactly as the way they are.

There’s this part of me right now, this collapsable space, that has inflated waiting for the unexpected to happen.

It’s not a place of focus, but rather a space for things to open themselves up to me. I never slam doors shut in my life because I know everything has a very cyclical aspect to it. You never know when things are going to come back around…and they usually happen in the most unexpected ways.

There was one point in my life where I did shut doors and I closed myself off to many different types of experiences. My life as of late has been a barrier-and-wall-breaking-fiasco where I’ve been tearing down every single defense I have in sight. Those walls of the past are coming down faster than ever because I know for a fact that walls keep things out – but they also keep things in. When you build walls, you prevent yourself from giving your gifts and full self to the world. So they’ve been coming down, and even though some emotions and thoughts sneak in now that I am not really comfortable with, I’ve developed the ability to sit with them and give them enough space to roam around and calm down.

There are great mysteries right around the corner that I can’t wait to see.

I have absolutely no idea what they are, what they may be, or how they will come about. But what I do know is this.

I know exactly the type of man I’m going to be when they arrive.

Evan Sanders
The Better Man Project