The Oh Shit Moment

I was sitting on my back porch, watching the sky turn that particular shade of purple that only shows up right before dark. The kids were inside, asleep. I'd been numb for months—not sad, not angry, just gone.

And yet I couldn't stop noticing everything. The neighbor's air conditioner clicking on. A dog barking three houses down. The way the porch chair creaked when I shifted my weight. My body was registering every sound, every sensation, every flicker of movement in my periphery—while my emotional life had gone completely offline.

That's the part no one tells you about. You can be numb and overwhelmed at the same time. Unable to access your own grief while a crinkly water bottle in the next room makes you want to crawl out of your skin. Emotionally flatlined. Sensorially on fire.

I'd been living in that place for a while. Functioning. Performing. Showing up to my life without actually being in it.

But that night on the porch, something cut through.

Not a flood of emotion. Not a breakdown. Just a single, quiet thought: I can't keep living like this.

That's it. That's the whole moment. No music swelling. No epiphany cascading into action. Just a glimpse—a crack in the fog where I could suddenly see clearly.

I didn't know it then, but that moment had a name. I call it the Ember now.

The Ember isn't dramatic. It's not the feeling coming back. It's not the dam breaking. It's the first oh shit—the moment your eyes open just enough to see that something has to change.

And then comes the choice.

You can shove it down. Close the door. Convince yourself it wasn't that serious, you're fine, you've been handling it. Go back to the fog because at least the fog is familiar.

You can let it explode. Turn that glimpse into a fireball—reactive, chaotic, burning everything around you without direction. Quitting the job, ending the marriage, torching the friendship, all in the same week. Movement that feels like progress but is really just destruction without aim.

Or you can let it set.

Letting the Ember set doesn't mean you have a plan. It doesn't mean you know what to do next. It means you stay with what you saw. You don't shove the clarity back down, and you don't let it detonate. You just... hold it. Let your eyes stay open.

That choice—the choice to let it set—is what tells your nervous system you're ready. Ready for capacity to start building. Ready to see more. Ready for what comes next.

What comes next isn't comfortable.

When you let the Ember set, it eventually catches. And when it catches, it doesn't just warm you—it burns. Not you. The things around you that were never really yours to begin with.

The friendships where your belonging was performance. The family dynamics where your role was to manage everyone else's emotions. The groups where fitting in required you to abandon yourself at the door.

The Flame doesn't ask permission. It just clarifies. And clarification means loss.

This is where people think they've made a mistake. They let the Ember set, and now their life is on fire, and they're losing people, losing roles, losing the version of themselves that everyone was comfortable with. They think: I shouldn't have opened this. I should have stayed numb. At least numb was stable.

But numb wasn't stable. Numb was containment. And containment always has a limit.

The Flame is what happens when you stop containing and start letting the fire show you what's real. It's not punishment. It's not self-destruction. It's the natural result of finally seeing clearly and refusing to unsee.

Some things don't survive that. They're not supposed to.