Life Transitions - A New Beginning In Life

Image Credit: HBO

Going through a life transition and starting a new beginning in life can be both daunting and exhilarating. It’s a mix of fear and self-doubt, balanced by self-belief. It asks you to take a leap of faith—a bet on yourself.

I’m sharing my husband, Andrew Southam’s, very first Substack post because it beautifully captures what it feels like to stand on the edge of change. In it, he reflects on starting something new, and his words resonate deeply with the experience of navigating a life transition and embracing a new beginning in life.

Beginnings

This is the very beginning.

It’s always scariest at the beginning, right? Somewhere, years ago, I read about the theory of dangerous precedents; “Never do anything for the first time.” A quick look online just taught me this idea comes from the law, meaning, basically, try to find legal precedent to support your case, rather than create something new that may be contested or defeated. But it’s also a feeling I’ve had over and over in my life; the first, hopeful sense of a thing I wanted to try, and then up looms the risk of failure, of humiliation, of disappointment, towering up like The Wall along the border of the Kingdom of the North, in Game of Thrones. “100 leagues long and over 700 feet high and made of solid ice. Constructed using both magic and mundane means“. How perfect.

We haul these things out of the prop cupboard, I do anyway, to get in our own way. So, if you’re reading this, know I’ve spent a lot of time staring up at the Wall, putting post-it notes on it, avoiding it to attend to other things, having snacks, feeling exhausted, feeling alternately that there might be worth in this, and that it might be worthless. This thing called a Substack.

If I can reach for any reassurance, it’s that so many really good things in my life, ideas, creative projects, adventures, conversations have been proceeded by the most uncomfortable feelings. I’ve learned to trust how untrustworthy they are, the feelings that say “don’t do it”. So here I am, let’s see how this goes. I’ll tell you everything I can that I think you might find interesting. I hope to entertain and surprise you, and possibly myself. I’ll be as honest as I can, and I hope in doing that, you might find good company here, and, as I always hope when I read anything at all, a bit less alone. My sense that the world we’re living in, with its promise and possibility of connection, has done so much to isolate us is not an original one. What I can offer here that’s original is me. There’s only one. To pinch Dave Pirner’s great lines, “I can go where no one else can go. I know what no one else knows.” He follows this with a cautionary “Here I am, just drowning in the rain”, lest we forget being wholly and originally ourselves is never without some risk.   

 instagram: @tracysondern