Your new life will cost you your old one.
It was a phrase I had heard many times, but as I lay there in the dark, I began to understand it on a much deeper level. It wasn’t about walking away from people, places, things. It was about becoming a different version of myself and allowing the things that were meant for that version of me to exist, which meant allowing any and all things that defined the prior version of me to be released.
It was about new thought patterns and new ways of being in the world. It was about seeing life and myself differently. It was about reacting and responding from a different space in my mind, my heart, my body, and my soul. It was about rewiring my subconscious.
It was pitch dark, and I couldn’t see anything, but I recognized that my body was searching, almost like my eyes wanted to see the concepts that were landing for me. I could feel my eyes darting back and forth, and as they moved, energy began to awaken in my body.
The new life required me to be a different version of me, which I didn’t understand fully until I was solidly on the path to becoming her. Over the past month, I had made choices that previously would have felt difficult, and I watched those choices have a large impact on my life. It felt like when I was a child and I would make a snowball. In the beginning, it seemed like I would roll and roll, and the snowball would barely get any larger. But then, all of a sudden, the snowball would pick up size and speed rapidly. Similarly, I had made a bunch of small choices all at once, and the momentum of those choices was now growing.
The stories I told myself that created the old version of me couldn’t exist in the mind and nervous system of the new version of me. My new life would cost me my old one. And just like that, something shifted. I understood this new life and this new version of me.
The next morning, the house looked the same, and my children looked the same, but everything was different. My thoughts were all different, and the way that I responded to emails, clients, calls, and friends were all different.
My new life had cost me my old one, except all that I really lost was my old way of being in a relationship with the world and with myself.