The Shell is Breaking
Maybe we don’t become what we already are. Maybe we slowly break through everything that convinced us we weren’t.
I came home from Nantucket yesterday afternoon, but part of me is still there.
Nantucket has always felt deeply meaningful to me. I’ve returned several summers in a row, and there is something about the island that feels like more than simply loving a beautiful place. It feels familiar in a way I can’t explain.
Recognition without a memory attached to it.
This time, I began wondering what exactly I was recognizing.
I believe we’re multidimensional beings. I believe consciousness is far more expansive than this one physical life. I believe in the Divine.
And yet, somewhere in contemplating all of that, a much more personal question surfaced:
Do I actually trust that I am divine in nature?
Not intellectually. Not spiritually or philosophically.
Do I trust it in my bones?
Because it occurred to me that perhaps I’ve spent much of my life believing that divinity exists while somehow excluding myself from it.
That’s a very different realization.
And yes, at almost 65, there’s a part of me that can say, Haven’t we been here before?
I’ve spent decades exploring consciousness. I’ve examined old beliefs, worked on myself, healed things, uncovered things, understood things. None of this is exactly new.
But perhaps that’s not how this works.
Maybe awakening isn’t a realization we have once.
Maybe we encounter the same truth at progressively deeper levels until eventually the body begins to believe what the mind has known for years.
On Nantucket, little things began happening.
I walked out of a smoothie shop one morning and found a white feather at my feet.
Later, after writing about it, I sat beside a pond surrounded by what seemed like a hundred mallards. I looked up and there was a small deer standing perhaps twenty feet away, staring directly at me.
I joked that I didn’t necessarily believe the universe had dispatched Deer #742 with a special message for Valerie.
I still don’t.
I like proof. I’ve always liked proof.
But something shifted in the question itself.
What if what is changing isn’t what the universe is sending me—but what I’m capable of noticing?
Maybe the feather wasn’t evidence of the Divine.
Maybe the ducks weren’t.
Maybe the deer wasn’t.
Maybe they were simply expressions of the same thing I am.
And perhaps meaning doesn’t have to be provable before I’m allowed to experience it.
Then came my final night on Nantucket.
I had a nightmare.
I remember very little of it. There was something frightening—some sort of monster coming after me. Although even now I’m not certain whether it was coming after me or somehow in me.
I couldn’t get away.
I couldn’t call out.
I couldn’t call for help.
And then I woke up with words literally in my mouth:
“I’ll fucking kill you.”
It frightened me.
But now, from the safety of my own bed at home, I wonder if something else was happening.
Maybe after a lifetime of trying to understand, heal, negotiate with and outrun certain beliefs about myself, some deeper part of me finally found its voice.
Enough.
Not I will destroy some terrible part of myself.
But perhaps:
This belief does not get to own me anymore.
And this morning another image came.
I imagined that this knowing—this trust in my own divine nature—had actually been inside me all along, locked away in a vault.
So I imagined unlocking it.
And then the image changed.
I saw a chick hatching from its shell.
That image stopped me.
Because the chick doesn’t suddenly become alive when the shell breaks.
It was alive inside the shell the whole time.
First an embryo. Growing quietly. Becoming. Developing into something fully alive while still enclosed within something that both protected it and kept it contained.
And then eventually comes the struggle.
The chick has to break through.
Hatching isn’t graceful. It isn’t instantaneous. It requires effort. The shell cracks a little at a time.
And perhaps that’s what these years have been.
Perhaps some of my oldest beliefs were once a kind of shell. They protected me. Helped me navigate the world. Helped me seek approval, belong, survive disappointment, make sense of myself.
I don’t have to hate the shell.
But I may no longer need to live inside it.
And maybe the struggle itself isn’t evidence that I’m failing to evolve.
Maybe the struggle is evidence that I’m hatching.
That’s what feels different to me now.
I’m not discovering some new spiritual truth at almost 65. In many ways, I’ve known this for decades.
But perhaps knowing something and allowing your nervous system to finally relax into the truth of it are two very different things.
Perhaps the embryo has been growing all this time.
Perhaps the chick has been alive all along.
And perhaps I don’t need to become divine, worthy, whole or enough.
I don’t need to become what I already am.
I am simply—and slowly—breaking through what kept me from knowing it.
The shell is breaking.
And maybe, for now, that’s enough.
