I’m writing to you from a dentist’s office today. During my skincare routine this morning, I decided firmly that I would not let the time waiting for Dustin’s dental procedure go to waste in a beige vinyl waiting room.
At best, I hoped it would be an opportunity to practice writing from an environment that would have previously made me anxious. So far, it’s mostly been about getting distracted by Janet Jackson ballads from 1991 and wondering how common it is to only realize how embarrassingly smudged your laptop screen is once you’re in public. Google AI cautioned me not to use an “abrasive tissue.” I did anyway. It was all I could find, and I was panicked.
Lately I’ve been wading through liminal energy, that familiar awareness that growth is available if I’m willing to tolerate the in-between. It arrived in waves of boredom. I’ve been doing my best to lean into the discomfort and let it show me where expansion wants to be planted.
Lo and behold, an unexpected sprout has pushed through.
True to form, the life process knocked on my door with humbling experiences and a simple question: do you want to be comfortable, or do you want to grow?
Side note, how do dentist offices choose their radio stations? I would assume something soothing, spa-adjacent. This one went inspirational arena rock. It would take a heart of stone not to feel something when Grace Slick and Mickey Thomas declare, in earnest, “We can build this dream together, standing strong forever, nothing’s gonna stop us now.”
You’re gosh dang right, Starship. You’re gosh dang right.
But you could have fooled me a couple Tuesday nights ago, when I clung like a sick koala to the porcelain throne at the new CrossFit gym Dustin and I joined. It was my first workout. My second trip to the bathroom. Metallica, I think, thundered through the walls. It was dark and wet. Sirens wailed somewhere outside. Explosions rang through my ears. Doom felt imminent.
Dustin knocked softly. “Can I come in?”
I wanted to go home. Back to my safe life of studying astrology transits with my pink ghost mug of tea, watching the Hercules Chocolate team or Giselle the Hutterite from Canada.
“If this were soccer practice, you’d get back out there,” he said.
That’s the side of my husband that pushes me beyond my comfort zone. I love that side. He sees capability in me that often exceeds my own self-perception.
But this time, he wasn’t entirely right.
This had happened at soccer practice. Maybe not with barbells and burpees, but with that same internal experience of feeling inadequate, exposed, like an imposter. And instead of pushing through it, I quit.
I still remember how disappointed my mom was. She had just bought me a team embroidered hoodie, a purchase that stretched the budget. The embarrassment at school the next day. Teammates I had played alongside for three years avoiding eye contact.
My vocabulary for mental health was much shorter then. I didn’t know what was happening to me. Only that I felt swallowed whole.
I stopped eating lunch in the cafeteria and claimed the same seat in the library by the window each day. Across the street sat a Pueblo Revival, its stucco walls set against a Wisconsin landscape, suggesting that two seemingly opposing truths can occupy the same space.
When autumn came, I did not return. A counselor later told me it had been the wrong decision, that my avoidant tendencies had been given a hall pass.
Still, I finished my education online and found myself working full time as a nanny for three children. Looking back, I can see veins of grace in that season. It was there that I began identifying my glass ceiling patterns.
Life, in its relentless generosity, keeps reintroducing us to containers that mirror our edges. Many of my glass ceilings play the same tune on repeat. It’s catchy. It goes something like this:
On the top floor of my glass ceiling
there’s a record stuck on repeat,
Don’t be messy. Don’t be seen.
Keep it polished. Keep it clean.
Whispers wrapped in pretty warnings,
soft as doubt beneath my feet.
Listening to that voice is a wicked trick. It masquerades as safety. In reality, it’s just stinking up the break room with chili dog toots and gossiping about imaginary disasters.
One of the best things I’ve ever done was challenge it. The next best thing was learning to ignore it entirely.
That process wasn’t easy. It’s the same one that led to losing over one hundred and fifty pounds. It’s the same one that continues to meet me daily.
If I had a time machine like the one Uncle Rico wanted, I’d zip back to 2010 and tell myself to throw that glass ceiling boombox straight out the window with a huck-tew and get back to practice, because it made me proud. I’d also gently advise young Beth not to swing on the exit poles at Shopko in the Northland Mall. The last time I did, my foot slipped in front of a very cute maintenance worker and I passed gas loudly mid-fall from the sheer shock of it. He heard. I evaporated.
Character building.
While we can’t redo the past, we do possess the present. The power to choose. The power to act. The power to see something through.
Threshold energy is terrifying, especially if you like control. Hi. It’s me.
But it’s also transformational. It begins the life-changing process the moment we say yes.
Which is exactly what I said when I walked back onto the gym floor.
“Are you planning on coming back tomorrow?” my coach asked.
Yes. Yes, I am.
Elizabeth Modene 
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