Take The Tiny Step

because mountains are moved in micro-shifts

I’m writing to you from my home office today. Legs propped up, sitting sideways in my cozy chair. The fluffy and ridiculously oversized one that I bought second-hand off Facebook Marketplace sometime last year.

This chair sat unused for months, taunting me. A constant reminder that I wanted to write, but never did.

Then, at the end of 2023, I read The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. It was one of those books that changed everything. Rubins words reminded me of a truth I’d always known but never acknowledged—I didn’t have to prove that I was a writer.

My creativity wasn’t something I needed to earn. It was a part of my authentic nature. I didn’t need another degree or an audience or a job title to start chasing my dreams.

I just needed to write.

Determined to remember why I fell in love with writing to begin with, I took away the pressure to perform and devoted myself to pure creative expression.

At the start of the 2024, I spent countless early morning hours sitting in this exact spot. Crawling into this chair, half-asleep at 5:00 am, I’d set a timer for 30 minutes and let the words fall out of me. I wrote without stopping to judge myself. I wrote without any intention or plan. I opened my laptop, opened my heart, and let the words take me to wherever they needed to go.

(—Rick Rubin, The Creative Act)

I held onto this practice for months, until the timer became useless and I found myself crawling back into that chair at all times of day.

Writing became as easy as breathing. I craved those early mornings in my office, the comfort and familiarity of this chair, the weight of my laptop on my legs. The soft tapping rhythm of my fingers dancing across the keys.

This simple practice gave birth to rivers and rivers of words. Words that I never thought I would share. Words that I haven’t revisited until now.

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“I’ve been stuck above myself for the longest time – floating aimlessly around in a reality that isn’t fully aligned with what I want".”

“There is no big uncertain pain waiting for me on the other side of these words.”

“That’s the thing I’m most afraid of. To never try. To always be too afraid to believe in myself.”

“At least I didn’t die without trying to become the person I wanted to become.”

“I can’t really figure out when it all started? When I went from believing I could do anything to being afraid to even have dreams at all? What happened to me?”

“Peel off the layers. Dust yourself off. Discover your essence.”

“Becoming is such a beautiful process. Stepping into your own future footsteps. Following them like an invisible path towards the life you’ve been craving.”

“What if our biggest challenges were also our greatest gifts?”

“That’s the nature of fear, it sweeps us away to a place where we’re disconnected from ourselves and the truth of who we really are. It puts us in our heads and pulls us out of our hearts.”

“I’m the snake shedding her skin, again and again and again.”

“It’s what I think “healing” really is. A walk backwards back to ourselves. An uncovering. An unmasking. A discovering.”

On those calm mornings, with my face lit only by the light of my laptop screen, these words came effortlessly through me. I wasn’t thinking about where I was going. I wasn’t thinking about what I was saying or who might read it. I wasn’t wondering how this new habit would change in my life. I wasn’t calculating how long it would be before I’d get a book deal or go viral. I wasn’t trying to create anything valuable.

I was just dipping my toes back into my magic.

There came a point when writing for myself was no longer enough. A point when the sharpest peaks of my doubts started fading in my rearview mirror. I was ready to share.

Enter in, Substack.

At the top of this year, I had no intentions of starting a newsletter or quitting my job. I had no idea that I would end up here. I just knew that writing was as important to me as breathing and I was so sick of feeling suffocated by my own fear.

Yet here I am, one year later, with a life I can barely even recognize. I feel like myself again. For so long, I denied myself the gift of expression. I threw my creativity away because it didn’t fit into the practical, logical path that I’d ended up on. I told myself it was too late or it would be too hard. I told myself I didn’t have the platform, that there was no point in writing if no one was reading. But then I decided to see what could happen, if I stopped believing those fears for just long enough to try.

And that tiny step? It gave me so much more than this newsletter and my business. It brought me back home to myself.

When we take that first tiny step in a new direction, we don’t know how far forward it will carry us. We can’t see where we will land.

So often, we stop ourselves from chasing the life we want because we’re terrified by the enormous amount of change it will take. We see the path forward in massive steps and colossal shifts and we just don’t think we’re capable of stretching ourselves far enough walk the distance.

But what if you don’t need a plan?

What if you don’t need to see the whole path?

What if instead, you just started trusting in the power of a tiny step?

Let this be the year that you stop underestimating the power of one degree of change. You are always one small shift, one seemingly insignificant decision, one tiny little step away from a completely different life. You just have to take it.

Love Always,

Krista Marie

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