This Too Shall Pass

There are certain things we say to ourselves so often that, eventually, we stop really hearing them. This too shall pass is one of mine.

I have carried those four words through difficult periods of my life, usually without saying them aloud and without necessarily knowing whether I believed them in the moment. They were never meant to suggest that whatever I was experiencing was insignificant, or that there was some guaranteed better version of life waiting just around the corner. They were simply a reminder that whatever felt all-consuming at the time was not permanent. Feelings change. Circumstances change. We change.

Perhaps that is one of the strangest things about being an adult. We can become remarkably good at carrying on.

There are days when something is weighing heavily on us, yet we still get dressed, go to work, answer the phone, make dinner, reply to the message we have been avoiding and turn up where we are expected to be. From the outside, very little appears unusual. The day looks much like any other day, and because everyone around us seems to be doing the same thing, it becomes easy to assume that everyone else is managing just fine.

I have come to think that this is one of the great misunderstandings of ordinary life: we confuse someone's ability to keep going with their absence of struggle.

We rarely know what is happening beneath the surface of another person's life. The person sitting beside us at work may be worrying about a parent. The friend who seems to have everything together may be quietly questioning a decision they made years ago. The person who always asks how everyone else is doing may be the one who most needs someone to ask them the same question.

And perhaps we don't see these things because most of us have become very good at participating in the performance of being okay.

Not necessarily because we are dishonest, but because we have been taught, in subtle ways, what a functioning adult is supposed to look like. We keep our difficulties private, maintain our routines, make sensible decisions and try not to inconvenience anyone with the messier parts of being human. There is comfort in this. There is also a cost.

Because when everyone is trying to appear as though they are coping, everyone can begin to believe that they are the only one who isn't.

The permission to be real

I have always found it interesting how quickly a room can change when one person decides to be honest.

Someone admits that they are struggling, and almost immediately another person says, “Actually, I've been feeling the same way.” Someone talks openly about a decision they are frightened to make, and suddenly the person listening feels able to talk about the decision they have been quietly wrestling with themselves.

Nothing external has changed. The problems are still there. Yet something has shifted.

Perhaps this is part of what authenticity really gives us. We often think of being authentic as something we do for ourselves, as though it is simply about living in accordance with who we are. But there is another side to it that I think is just as important: our willingness to be real can give someone else permission to be real too.

There is a reason vulnerability can be contagious in the best possible sense. When someone risks showing us something that is imperfect, uncertain or unresolved, they quietly change the rules of the conversation. They tell us that we don't have to arrive polished. We don't have to have the right answer. We don't even have to pretend that everything is fine.

Psychologist Brené Brown has spent years studying vulnerability and shame, and one of the ideas that has stayed with me is that connection depends, in part, on our willingness to be seen as we actually are rather than as we think we are supposed to be. It sounds simple, but it is surprisingly difficult to live that way when so much of modern life encourages us to curate the version of ourselves that other people see.

Social media has made this especially visible, but the habit is much older than Instagram. We have always understood that there are certain versions of ourselves that are easier for the world to accept. The successful version. The composed version. The person who has made the right choices and knows where they are going.

What happens, though, when we spend so long presenting that version that we begin to forget to ask ourselves whether it is actually who we want to be?

That question has stayed with me.

The life we are told to want

There is a particular kind of life that is presented to us as sensible.

Study. Find a good job. Build a career. Buy a home. Be responsible. Make decisions that can be explained easily to other people. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of these things, and for many people they are exactly the life they want.

But somewhere along the way, I think it can become difficult to tell the difference between what we genuinely want and what we have simply learned to want.

We can become so accustomed to the idea of a safe choice that we stop asking whether it still feels safe inside us.

I don't mean financial security isn't important. It is. I don't mean everyone should walk away from their job tomorrow and start a business, move overseas or reinvent their life because they have woken up feeling restless. Sometimes staying is the brave thing. Sometimes responsibility means putting our own desires aside for a while.

But I do think there are moments when something inside us becomes difficult to ignore.

Perhaps it is a creative idea that keeps returning. Perhaps it is a relationship that no longer feels like home. Perhaps it is the quiet knowledge that the life you have built looks perfectly good on paper but doesn't feel quite like yours anymore.

Those moments are uncomfortable because they ask something of us that certainty cannot provide.

They ask us to choose without knowing the ending.

And that is where I find myself now.

Taking the risk

I left my corporate job to create Stem & Cellar.

Writing that sentence is much easier than making the decision was.

There is a romantic version of taking a risk that we often see after the fact. Someone leaves the secure job, follows their passion and eventually everything works out, making the original decision look inevitable. But real life doesn't happen that way, at least not for me.

I don't know what will happen.

I don't know whether people will love what I have created. I don't know whether Stem & Cellar will become what I imagine it could become. I have wondered whether I will regret leaving something secure, whether I am capable of building something of my own and whether I have made a decision that will eventually prove to have been foolish.

All of those thoughts have been there.

But underneath them has been something else: the feeling that I would be more disappointed in myself if I never tried.

For a long time, I think I believed that courage meant feeling certain enough to take the leap. I am beginning to think it may be almost the opposite. Perhaps courage is recognising that you cannot know what will happen and deciding that not knowing is still worth living with.

I am not more courageous than anyone reading this. I am not more capable, more certain or somehow better equipped to take a risk. I have simply reached a point where I am willing to find out what happens if I trust that persistent feeling instead of continuing to talk myself out of it.

And maybe that is all any of us can really do.

From the Cellar Table

For those who believe giving is an art

Written by Sara

Founder, Stem & Cellar