Five Doors

Walk through

or Who Even Am I?

Do you ever have moments where you just know — deep down, in a way that doesn't really argue with itself — that something is right? Like a door opens, and you understand before you've thought it through that you need to walk through it?

I've had that moment at least five times in my life. Five distinct times. I can actually count them.

The first was meeting Dave. We met, got engaged three weeks later, married seven months after that. Thirty-three years on, here we are.

The second was getting involved with a company so foreign to anything I'd done that I questioned it over and over and over — and it became the catalyst for almost every opportunity that came after.

The third was moving to India. With four young children. Never in my life would I have imagined I'd choose that, but the door opened, and we walked through it.

The fourth was Heroic — the coach training, the workshop instructor certification, building Heroic Tucson. The fact that we live in Arizona at all is still mildly baffling to me, but military life is its own choreography.

And the fifth — the one I'm still catching up to — is co-founding a nonprofit.

Co-founding a nonprofit. What? Who even am I? Who is this person saying that out loud? And where exactly is Angela, the "just the mom" person I was so familiar with for so many years?

Here is what I have come to understand about those five doors, looking back: every one of them was a choice between fear and love. Fear had a perfectly reasonable case in every single instance. Fear said you barely know him, you're too young, this is too fast. Fear said you have no idea what you're doing in this industry. Fear said India, with four small children, are you out of your mind. Fear said you are not the kind of person who co-founds anything.

Love said something quieter. Love said walk through.

I feel called to this work. I know it in my soul.

The honest part — and this matters — is that Human Flourishing wasn't my idea originally. It was Scott's. What it is becoming is something neither of us could have built alone: his original vision melded with the work and experiences of our combined lifetimes, with the things we care deeply about, with everything we've each been shaped by along the way. The aim is to help individuals, families, communities, and even nations realize their potential and become the best versions of themselves. (You can find what we've begun building at humanflourishing.us.)

Here's what I'll also say honestly: I am not naturally built for some of what this work asks of me. I'm not a salesman. I'm not good at asking for things. And I have, for most of my life, dramatically undervalued myself and what I'm capable of doing.

Years ago, working on a large project for my church community, someone — a person who'd built a genuinely remarkable career — told me, "You could run a Fortune 500 company." I laughed it off immediately. Of course I did. Fear is fluent in laughter; it knows how to make the unbelievable thing sound silly the moment it's said out loud.

But every now and then, when I'm stepping into something new, that sentence comes back to me. Not because I think I'm going to run a Fortune 500 company. Because someone, once, looked at me and saw something I couldn't yet see in myself. And every time that sentence comes back, I have the same choice I had at every other door: I can flinch and dismiss it, or I can let it in.

Letting it in is love. Love for the version of yourself who is actually capable. Love enough to give yourself permission to walk through the door. Love enough to do the difficult thing. Love enough to believe you might be useful to people in ways you haven't been brave enough to try.

That's the thing. That is actually the thing.

What I needed, in order to start stepping into who I really was, was for someone to believe I was capable. To name it. To say it out loud where I could hear it. And then I had to be willing to choose the love version of the story over the fear version of the story — because nobody else can make that choice for you.

I am increasingly convinced that every single person on this planet needs the same thing. Not the cheap version — empty affirmation, "you're amazing," the participation-trophy of the soul. The real version. Someone seeing what's actually there, and naming it before you can. And then the harder, quieter step that follows: the person themselves choosing love over fear about who they're allowed to become.

We have grown unsettlingly good at the opposite. We are practiced at tearing each other down — and even more practiced, I think, at tearing ourselves down on the inside, where nobody else can see it. The cost is not abstract. It shows up in the people who never start the thing they were called to start, who never write the book, never make the call, never walk through the door.

Now that Dave has "retired" from the Air Force — quotation marks because he's already begun a second career — we get to stay in one place. After thirty years and roughly twenty moves, that's its own kind of astonishment. It also means I'm finally getting to find out what I can do when I'm not unpacking boxes every couple of years.

What I'm finding is this: every door I've walked through began with the same small interior moment — the choice to believe love's version over fear's version. And what I want, more than almost anything I've ever wanted, is to help build a world where more people get to make that same choice, and have someone standing there to say yes, I see it too, walk through.

If everyone lifts where they stand — and lets themselves be lifted — the whole world will rise higher.

That's the work. That's all of it.