Written by our founder, Caragh.

Earlier this year, I was met with news of a cancer progression.

There are certain pieces of news that seem to divide time into a before and an after, even when you have already lived through enough uncertainty to know something about how these moments unfold. There’s the conversation itself, the practical questions that suddenly need answers and then the slower emotional process of understanding what you have actually been told.

For a few weeks, I wobbled. Properly.

I was frightened, angry and thrown by the sudden uncertainty. This year was the year I had decided was going to be full of goodness. And then, once more, things I had allowed myself to believe in suddenly felt less promised, and I found myself looking again at plans I had made and futures I had quietly begun believing in.

Once I let people know my news, a former client sent me a kind message. She told me that everything I do, I do with grit and grace.

Her words stayed with me, partly because they were kind, but mostly because they seemed to describe something I had been trying to understand about myself for a long time. I know a lot about grit. I have relied on it heavily over the years. It has got me out of bed, into appointments I did not want to attend, through difficult conversations and across periods of my life where there really was no alternative but to keep going.

But as the initial shock of this latest news has begun to settle, I’ve noticed that something felt different this time. Not because I’ve found some wonderfully evolved way to rise above fear. The fear and uncertainty was still real.

What has felt different is the way I’ve been meeting it.

The future I was making smaller

One of the adaptations I have become increasingly aware of in myself is a slightly complicated relationship with hope.

Throughout most challenges, I’ve been able to hope for the best possible outcome. I can imagine the beautiful version of things. I can work towards it, plan for it and talk about it. But I am not sure I've always allowed myself to believe in it completely, in that deeper, more visceral way where you really let yourself expect that life will work out well.

I’ve had the rug pulled out from under me by life one too many times, which has meant that there’s often been a hyper-vigilant part of me keeping watch in the background.

When life has surprised you badly, there can be a strange comfort in never placing all of your emotional weight behind the best-case scenario. If you keep a little distance from hope, perhaps disappointment cannot catch you quite so unprepared.

The problem is what happens when something difficult does happen. My instinct has often been to adapt quickly by unintentionally making the rest of the future smaller too. If X has gone wrong, perhaps Y cannot happen either. If this part of life has become uncertain, perhaps I should reconsider that plan, lower that expectation, stop imagining that possibility. One bad thing begins quietly negotiating away things that have nothing to do with it.

I could feel myself beginning to do that again this year. Cancer had progressed, so perhaps the future needed to contract around that fact. Perhaps certain ambitions were unrealistic now. Perhaps plans should become more cautious. Perhaps I should prepare myself emotionally for a life with less possibilities in it. But this time, actually without trying, something in me rebelled against that. (Always the rebel!)

What I am rebuking is the idea that because one difficult thing has happened, everything else has to shrink around it. This time, I am choosing to really embody the belief that things can still work out beautifully.

I don't mean that as a guarantee about any particular outcome. None of us gets those. I mean that I'm allowing myself to believe fully in the possibility of a life that is expansive, joyful, ambitious, interesting and deeply mine. I'm refusing to use uncertainty in one part of my life as evidence that all of the other things I want are now somehow less available to me. That's been a much bigger shift than I expected.

Healing without fixing

For a long time, there was a part of me that approached healing as a kind of repair project. Something happens to us, it leaves an impact, and then we do the work. We understand it, process it, journal about it, perhaps talk about it in therapy and gradually try to loosen its hold.

There is enormous value in that work. It has changed my life. It has helped me understand patterns that once made no sense to me and has given me tools I did not have when some of the original experiences happened.

But healing can quietly acquire a supposed destination. Somewhere in the background, there can be an imagined future version of ourselves who has dealt with everything properly. A version who is calmer, less affected, less fearful and sufficiently repaired.

I think that idea has loosened its grip on me. My healing is no longer hinged on fixing something ‘broken’. I no longer want to spend my life waiting to arrive at some finished version of myself before I allow myself to live properly.

I’ve accomplished some amazing things, and yet, I’ve still been playing small. Now, I want to live my life in as joyful a way as I can, and I want to let that become part of the healing.

Life can hold more than one truth at once. I can be frightened and still excited about something I am building. I can take my health seriously and still care enormously about work, creativity, travel, friendship, love, beautiful meals and entirely ordinary afternoons where nothing particularly significant happens. I can have difficult days without letting them become evidence that the life I want is disappearing.

I think this is what grace has started to mean to me.

Grit and Grace

When my former client used those words, I don't think she meant that I always handle difficult things calmly or elegantly. I certainly don't.

For me, grit is the part that knows how to keep moving when life demands it. It deals with what is in front of me. It gets practical, asks the questions, finds the information and does what needs to be done. I actually love this part of myself, it makes me really good at my work, and resilient in my life.

But grace is becoming something else entirely. It’s allowing myself to receive help without immediately trying to repay it (something I’m actively learning), and allowing other people to hold some of the weight. It’s letting life remain beautiful without demanding that it first become completely safe.

I need both. I recognise that now.
I no longer want grit to be the whole story. There’s a difference between being capable of surviving difficult things and building a life around survival. I don't want the measure of my life to be how much I can withstand.

That is perhaps the clearest thing this latest challenge has shown me.

Let living be part of the healing

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few years thinking about what transmutation actually means, drawing on my own experience and on years spent working with some of the leading names across a range of healing and personal development modalities. I’ve also been developing and refining my own tools along the way. What’s surprised me in this latest chapter is realising, almost after the fact, how much that work has changed the way I meet difficult things.

The transmutation, for me, is in the relationship I choose to have with what remains. It’s the difference between allowing a difficult experience to inform me and allowing it to define the outer edges of what I believe is still possible. It is being able to say, this has happened, it matters, I am affected by it, without automatically following that sentence with a list of all the other things I now assume I cannot have.

Now I wonder whether it is something closer to the level to which you’re able to remain open to life even after you know exactly how much it can hurt. That feels more difficult, and much more alive.

I am still in this. There are still days when my mind travels somewhere I don't want it to go. There are still moments when I would very much like a guarantee that everything will work out exactly as I hope. But I’m choosing to know that uncertainty does not get to make every decision.

I am choosing to believe in the beautiful outcome, not because I can prove it is coming, but because I no longer want fear to have the privilege of deciding what I am allowed to believe in.

Perhaps that is what grace and grit means to me now: having the grit to meet what is actually here, and the grace not to build the rest of my life around what might go wrong. More than anything, it means committing to living so fully that healing is no longer something I am waiting to complete. It is something happening alongside the life I am already choosing to live.