Find Your Courage.

Like joy, courage is also a necessary ingredient for transformation.

Yes, you can be brave, feeling the fear and doing it anyway: You brave the elements. You brave your fear. There’s a time and a place for that. But in my experience, bravery gives out sooner or later, and some projects, like this one, take time.

Courage, on the other hand, is renewable—just like capacity.

You can call on that courage, and you can convince yourself to take the next step, even if it’s tiny.

So, if you find yourself running out of steam, it might be that your bravery is no longer enough.

I include myself in this. Sharing my own journey requires enormous vulnerability. I am still much more comfortable sharing my fictional stories than my personal ones.

Even this winter, I had to take a pause to look around for my courage. Because I did, I can name it here:

I want to reclaim a little more of my capacity for positive change, because I want to use that capacity to build the kind of world I am dreaming about. That includes sharing my tender stories if they’re useful—my personal ones as well as fictional ones.

It’s possible that through my sharing here, others will also reclaim their capacity for change. I certainly hope so. This is actually the whole premise of Tending Transformation Fatigue.  

But I can’t know that for sure. That will only happen if others—like you, reader—invest their attention, time, and energy on their own transformation fatigue. 

Instead, this is what I know for sure:

I will personally reclaim my own capacity for change through this process, like shoveling snow off an overburdened porch.

Because I will be doing these exercises right alongside you, even when they’re uncomfortable.