Alien Juice and All: Stepping Into Your Power

I'm sitting on a green velvet sofa as I write this.

It's the one I bought after I sold my house and moved into a tiny space, the kind of impractical, gorgeous, slightly too much piece of furniture that has no business in a small living room. I bought it anyway. It is currently covered in a dog, a laptop, and me, mid sentence, thinking about how I got here.

Last night I was cooking dinner. Music was playing, the kind that gets into your shoulders before you notice, and I started singing. Then I started dancing a little, right there at the stove, for no one. No audience. No reason except that the song was good and my body wanted to move.

A few years ago, I would have caught myself. Felt a little silly. Toned it down.

I didn't catch myself last night. I just let it happen.

The Happy Dance

When I was teaching high school, I used to do something I called the happy dance. If a student did something worth celebrating, really worth it, they got the dance. It was loud. It was a little unhinged. It involved more arm movement than any respectable adult should display in a classroom.

I got eye rolls for it. Of course I did. Teenagers have a contractual obligation to roll their eyes at anything sincere.

But under those eye rolls, there were smiles. I saw them. They might not have said it out loud, but they liked being celebrated by someone who didn't play it cool about it.

I didn't start my teaching career doing the happy dance. It took years. It was a slow erosion, the part of me that used to hold back wearing down a little more each year, until one day the dance just came out and I let it stay.

That was the first crack. I didn't know it yet, but it was the beginning of something.

The cost of holding back

I taught for twenty six years. I loved my students. I am genuinely proud of that work.

But the job was slowly killing me. Not in a dramatic, easy to point to way. In the quiet way that happens when you give and give and give inside a system that was never built to hold the fullness of you, until there is less and less of you left to give.

I quit before I reached retirement age. That decision still feels a little unsteady to say out loud, even now. There was no safety net version of this. I taught yoga for a while. Then I got in over my head trying to build a directory for Indy Holistic Living, the kind of in over my head that makes you realize you need actual training, not just stubbornness. So a year ago, I took a web design class to figure it out. The class gave me more than I asked for. It gave me Page Park Design.

It has been one of the most unsteady years of my life. It has also been one of the most free.

What I keep noticing

Here is the thing nobody told me about stepping into your power. It is not a single moment. It is not a before and after photo. It is a practice, and the strange, beautiful part is that it compounds.

The more I let my own brand of weird come out, the easier it gets to let more of it out. I sing in the kitchen now. I dance while I cook. I use the weird voice. I get genuinely, embarrassingly excited when something amazing happens for one of my clients, the same unhinged energy I used to save for the happy dance, except now it just lives in me all the time.

It is not that I became braver overnight. It is that bravery, like most things worth having, builds on itself. Every time I let the real version of me show up and the world did not end, it got a little easier to let her show up again.

The older I get, the less I care what other people think. I used to hear people say that and assume it was about stopping caring. I don't think that is it anymore. I think it is about finally having spent enough years inside your own skin to trust it.

Green velvet sofa and all

I think about the version of me who taught for years before she let the happy dance out. I think about the version of me who would have stopped herself from dancing in the kitchen last night.

I am not interested in being that version anymore. Not because she was wrong. She was doing her best with what she had. But I have tasted what it feels like on the other side of holding back, and I am not going back.

This is what I want you to know, whoever you are, reading this on whatever device, however you found your way here. There is more on the other side of being fully yourself. Not a polished, curated, brand approved version of yourself. The real one. Green velvet sofa and all.

The weird voice. The kitchen dancing. The happy dance you have not let yourself do in years. Whatever your version of alien juice is, the parts of you that feel like too much or not enough or simply odd, that is not the thing standing between you and your power.

That is the power.

It just gets easier to access the more you let it out.

I'm still on the sofa. Still mid thought. Still, somehow, exactly where I am supposed to be.