Falling Through the Cracks

December 2025

There’s a moment in every major transition where it feels like you’ve miscalculated.

You’ve left what you knew.
You haven’t yet become who you’re going to be.
And suddenly, you’re suspended — falling through the cracks.

I wrote those words on my birthday in 2008, months after uprooting my life and moving to Casper. I didn’t know then that this feeling had a name. I just knew that something familiar had slipped away, and something new hadn’t fully arrived.

In one part of my life, I felt myself falling through the deepest cracks possible — losing pieces of identity as I barreled into the darkness below. That’s what change can do when it’s real. It doesn’t gently rearrange you. It dismantles you just enough to ask: Who are you without what you left behind?

What I couldn’t see at the time — but understand now — is that this wasn’t failure. It was transition doing its work.

When you leave a life that no longer fits, the ground doesn’t immediately reappear. There’s a stretch of free fall where old versions of you can’t follow. Where certainty is replaced by sensation. Where hope doesn’t feel solid yet — just visible.

But even then, I noticed the light.

That matters.

Because light doesn’t show up after the fall. It shows up during it — quiet, distant, but steady enough to remind you that you are not disappearing. You are crossing.

Looking back, this was the moment my identity loosened its grip so something truer could form. Casper didn’t immediately make me happy. It made me honest. It stripped away the scaffolding I’d leaned on and asked me to stand on my own boundaries.

Falling through the cracks wasn’t the end of me.

It was the space between who I had been and who I was becoming.

And sometimes, that space is the bravest place you can stand.