You Were the Fire
Have you ever experienced a moment when all you did was doubt yourself—when you felt burned out, misunderstood, weak, and simply wanted to hide from the world?
Have you ever gone back to visit that very same moment and wondered why you were so hard on yourself?
That’s the thing about moments when we are living inside them. We struggle to experience all that we are—to understand what we truly feel, why we observe the world the way we do, to decipher what is soul and what is ego, and to know what is worth it and what isn’t.
But later, when you take a step back, you begin to see the entirety of that moment come into view. It’s as if you had been standing six inches from a piece of Monet’s Impressionist art and then decide to step back six feet. Suddenly it becomes easier to understand it for all that it is—the purpose of every stroke, every color, every movement—when you see it from a distance.
From that distance, you begin to understand yourself better.
You see the transition that was taking place, though at the time you only felt the pain of stretching yourself—expanding at a faster rate than you were used to—and experiencing an energy that felt like it was burning you from the inside out.
That energy was fire.
And it was growing fiercer by the day, keeping you awake at night and filling you with a kind of discomfort you couldn’t quite explain. You tried everything you could to put it out, but it only seemed to rage stronger each time you attempted to smother it.
You see, the more you try to hide your light by keeping it trapped inside, the more it burns you.
But if you give it the freedom it needs—if you feed its hunger and give it air—it will, in exchange, give you power and magic.
It becomes a force within you that burns your ego to the ground. It pushes you beyond your comfort zones, beyond the darkness, and into a light so bright it feels as though you have landed on the sun.
No—more than that.
It feels as though you are the sun.
You become an overflow of energy, seeing prisms in everything you touch and everything you see.
Yet when you are inside the moment, it is difficult to recognize yourself as a burning torch. And yet, you are one—lighting the path for many others. Tiny embers from your flame carried by the wind, sparking fires in places you may never even see.
And only later—
from a distance,
from another perspective,
from another moment in time—
you understand something you could not see before.
You were never on fire.
You were the fire.
-Grace Ellen Lawrence | 2018