Plank By Plank

What it actually looks like to build evidence that it's safe to be you

I woke up tired and couldn’t name the feeling. It sat in my chest like sadness but it wasn’t sadness. It took me two hours to find it. Two hours of sitting with something that kept shape-shifting, dodging my attempts to pin it down, before I finally caught it.

I was angry.

Not at anyone else. At myself. For being so small. For spending fifteen years playing it small and calling it safety.

Here’s the thing that made me want to throw something: I already know who I am. I’ve always known my capacity. I’ve always known I’m somebody with many skill sets, many tools. I’ve resisted the confines of a 9 to 5 my entire adult life because something in me recognized that if I got put in something mediocre, my conditioning would keep me there. I’d get trapped in the proving, the ladder-climbing, the seeking praise from bosses. Something inside me was wise enough to steer me away from that.

And yet. I’m still performing. Still proving. With my strength training clients, there’s this false belief running underneath everything: they’re judging the quality of their experience with me so I need to earn their approval. That my worth is attached to someone else’s verdict. I know it’s not true. I can see the pattern clearly. But seeing it and being free of it are two completely different things. What got me wasn’t the pattern itself. It was the grief.

I’ve been on this unlearning journey long enough now to feel the weight of what I’m unlearning. Fifteen years of playing small. Fifteen years of people-pleasing and performing and proving myself to people who weren’t even asking me to. My root didn’t feel safe. It never learned how to. So I built my entire personality around earning safety from anyone who might confirm that I was worth something.

And now I’m angry that embodying myself is something I have to learn. Why isn’t it just something I know how to do? Why does inhabiting my own life feel like a skill I’m acquiring instead of something I was born with?

That anger is real. But here’s what I noticed today. My old self would have spiraled. Would have ruminated all day, caught in the gravity of that feeling, unable to pull herself out. My new self felt the anger, sat with it, named it, and then got up and put on workout clothes. I had a session planned. I was going to do it despite how I felt. Not because I was performing discipline. Because I recognized that this wasn’t a day where the workout was optional.

I got to the gym and my boss had scheduled another session in my slot. I hadn’t seen it on the calendar. I had to come home.

And I was still proud of myself.

The biggest unlock I’ve had in a while is the realization that the evidence you’ve changed doesn’t always look like a victory. Sometimes it looks like driving to the gym and driving back. Sometimes it looks like the spiral lasting two hours instead of two days. Sometimes it looks like catching the anger underneath the sadness underneath the tiredness and just letting yourself be angry.

I’ve been thinking about it like a rope bridge between two cliffs. Beat up, tattered, unsafe. For years I kept trying to white-knuckle my way across. What I didn’t realize is that I could go back to where I started, build new planks, and cross safely. That’s what I’m doing now. Building evidence. Curating it. Showing my nervous system, plank by plank, that it’s safe to be me.

So I’ve been picking up tools. Astrology, human design, somatic experiencing, destiny matrixes, etc. I know they’re just tools. But sometimes a tool gives you a gentle reminder of the person you forgot you’ve already become.

The low days still come. The days where I feel like I’m not good enough, where I’m convinced nobody will understand what I’m creating. But the distance between falling and standing is getting shorter. Not hours anymore. Minutes.

And it’s in these slow moments that I actually see who I’m becoming.

-Izzy

P.S. I just updated my website it’s kinda cool izquane.co