What I was waiting forIn 2020 I wrote that I had not taken a leap because I was afraid of the consequences. I was wrong about what was stopping me.I came back from three weeks in Norway convinced that the ordinary version of my life was something I had chosen by accident and could un-choose whenever I liked. I had walked the roof of the Oslo Opera House and timed myself circling a Viking ship, and I wrote down, with some confidence, that I wanted adventure now.Then it was 2020, for everyone.The brightness held for a while and then the dullness washed over it. After that came four years of my peace being attacked in the most ordinary way there is — hospitals, appointments, funerals. My father died. My mother fought cancer and won. A niece arrived, and a nephew. I bought a house. I took a job at Tesla and learned more there than anywhere.I want to be careful here, because I have said the lazy version of this to other people. The story goes that what stands between a person and the life they can picture is nerve. Sometimes it is. But for those four years what stood between me and it was a family that needed holding together while someone was dying, and there is no version of that stretch where the brave thing would have been to book another flight.Here is the part I did not expect. The waiting outlived the reason for it. My father was gone and my mother recovered and the calendar cleared, and I kept not doing the thing — because by then not-doing had become the shape of my life rather than a season in it. The grief had a reason. The habit it left behind did not.Who is actually holding it Two things, and neither is what I had been blaming. Society issues a story about the sensible order of a life: school, then a job, then a house, and then, if there is anything left over, the thing you actually wanted. Most of us sign it. I signed it.The second is worse, because it never has to say no out loud. It is us, declining on our own behalf, in advance, to spare ourselves the disappointment of having asked.Made for more, and I mean made I believe we were made for more than the small version, and I mean made — by something greater than us, on purpose, with intent. That is not a motivational claim, and it is not interchangeable with the one that sounds like it.“You deserve more” is what someone says when they are selling you something. “You were made for more” is either true or it is not.If it is true, then the smallness is a misreading rather than a fate. That distinction is the whole reason I can write this without embarrassment.Someone reading this is thinking it, and they are owed an answer rather than a slogan. I have two.The first is that you may already be living the thing you would have chosen. A life full of people who need you is not a lesser life, and I have no interest in telling a parent of three that their calendar is a failure of imagination. I have watched what it costs to show up for someone every day for years. That is not settling. That is the dream, wearing work clothes.The second is that this is mostly not a choice between two lives. I think we have more room than we let ourselves use, and that the leap is almost always smaller than the version we have spent years rehearsing not taking. Both things fit. You can hold the life you have and still ask for the thing you set down.I started a company in 2024. Not because I got brave — because I ran out of reasons to keep waiting, and noticed that nobody had been holding the permission the entire time. It was sitting where I left it.