I’m in day 47 of superhero training and it’s kicking my butt. Furies tug at my occipital bones. My brain is a dark vacuum. The whole city’s lights threaten to flicker and die from the stress. I flex my muscles in the cold night.

I’m not sure what I expected. My system keeps threatening to stop working. Inside I rebel, but it’s like a remark duly noted. I go along with all my being toward the black whole. I’m remade. My chest aches. My fingers buzz. A small bludgeon rolls around my forehead without lifting its hammer. I take a breath in and out and acquiesce.

Last night I learned that it’s really my fear that keeps my mind small. I’d been thinking it was because of all the focus on achievement, on crossing things off a list, and that not enjoying enough time to be contemplative has churned me into a petty nuisance.

But it’s the fear that keeps me lizard-like. As a kid, we were busy. My mom had to be at middle school an hour before my school began, so she’d drop me in the mornings to my friend Claudine’s house. We’d listen to the Beatles and eat Cream of Wheat soaked in butter and honey and play make believe and dream big dreams. Rockin’ around the world never kept me small then: My brain imagined and soaked in every nuance everywhere all the time anyway.

It’s the fear that accompanies bustling now that turns me silent and stilted. So I exhale. We must reclaim our lives from survival mode. We must say I reason, I create, I imagine. I do more than fight and flee.

Toxicity threatens everyone. I can sense that my headache has a story and it’s not so simple to unravel. It says, “I’m tired of growing. Can’t I simply rest and recover?”

She’s been asking this for weeks now. I’m being morphed, and willingness fuels me most of me. But many times on the sidelines I simply watch, astonished, wondering where I’ll wind up. I didn’t expect any of this from my bumpy, broiling life. Doesn’t matter. At long last I don’t know exactly what to expect. My teachers, Nature and Spirit (my higher self too), have a plan. And so, sleepy, I wake in the backseat and look out the window, trusting them the way I trusted my Mom on those early mornings. I don’t understand the whole cosmos, but I do know I allow my life to take me to wholly new worlds. Instead of seizing in fear against it all, I willingly emerge from my lizard armor. I say yes, please, no matter what. And this is where the tango music starts to play.

I bow my head and dance.