The Breakthrough Beyond the Breakthrough
There’s a cost to the level up—sometimes it’s the version of you that can’t come with you.
I’m getting really tired of people telling me, “Don’t give up right before the breakthrough.”
I know.
I KNOW.
They’re right, by the way, which is deeply annoying.
But when you have heard some version of keep going, it’s coming, you’re almost there enough times, eventually you’re like: Cool. Great. Wonderful. Could the breakthrough perhaps hurry the fuck up?
And then something happens. Not necessarily the thing you thought was going to happen.
Something in you breaks open instead.
That’s where I am right now (or when I was when I wrote this anyway ;))
I’ve had breakthroughs before. Beautiful ones. Painful ones. The kind where suddenly something you have been wrestling with for months or years clicks into place and you think, There it is. I got it.
But recently I found something else. The breakthrough beyond the breakthrough.
And the only way I can describe it is that I somehow shattered and became more whole at the exact same time.
There Is a Cost to the Level Up
I don’t think we talk enough about this part.
Everyone loves the level up. The expansion. The becoming. The answered prayer.
The new version of you.
What we talk about less is what it costs to get there. Because whatever is required for your next level will very often require you to lose something that cannot come with you.
And it might hurt like hell.
Not necessarily because the thing was good for you. Sometimes it hurts precisely because you thought it was you.
A belief. An identity. A role.
A protection mechanism. A way of relating to people. A version of your future.
A story you have repeated so many times you stopped recognizing it as a story and started calling it reality.
Then one day God starts pulling at the thread.
And you’re like: No…
Not that one.
That one is structural—load-bearing!!! It’s literally part of my personality.
And then you discover...
Maybe it wasn’t.
What if… it’s something you learned? Something you built?
Something that protected you once. Something that got you this far.
But not something designed to take you where you’re going next.
That realization is freeing. It is also deeply fucking uncomfortable.
Both can be true.
Sometimes You Don’t Understand the Letting Go Until Afterward
This may be one of the most frustrating things about transformation. You often don’t get the full explanation first.
Wouldn’t that be nice?
Hello, Stephanie. Here is the detailed itinerary for your spiritual transformation. On Tuesday, we will dismantle this belief. Wednesday will involve an ego death. Thursday you’ll understand why. Please bring snacks.
Unfortunately, that has not been my experience.
Sometimes you surrender something before you understand why it had to go. Maybe even grieve a version of yourself before realizing how exhausted she was making you.
Sometimes you don’t even know you’re carrying something until God shows you what life feels like without it.
And then you go:
Oh… OH.
I thought that was me.
It wasn’t.
If you know, you know. And if you don’t know yet… you probably will.
God bless you when you do. 😂
Seriously.
The Breaking Isn’t Always the Breakthrough
This is the thing I’m learning now. Sometimes the first breakthrough is simply realizing what needs to break. The deeper breakthrough comes when you realize who you are without it.
That’s different.
You can have an incredible revelation and still need to live your way into it. You can understand the wound, the pattern—why you created it.
Forgive yourself. Forgive somebody else.
Give it to God.
And then discover another layer underneath.
That used to frustrate me.
Seriously? There’s MORE?
Apparently yes. There’s often more.
But I don’t experience that the same way anymore. I don’t think it necessarily means the first breakthrough “didn’t work.” Maybe breakthrough is not a door you walk through once.
Maybe it’s expansion.
And every time your capacity expands, you can finally see something you weren’t yet able to see from where you stood before.
That doesn’t invalidate the previous breakthrough.
It reveals what became possible because of it.
I Thought Nothing Was Happening
This is something I’ve been noticing in my work too. There are periods where I genuinely feel like nothing is happening.
I get discouraged.
I look at the unfinished things, the open loops, the enormous vision, the pieces that haven’t landed yet and think:
What am I even doing?
And sometimes I get really fucking down about it.
Then something moves. A connection happens. A revelation lands. A scene comes. A concept unlocks. I write something.
I create something I couldn’t have created before whatever I just went through. And suddenly the period that looked like nothing wasn’t nothing at all.
Something was reorganizing underneath.
I want to be careful here because I don’t want to make suffering into some romantic prerequisite for creativity.
I don’t want my life to become:
Pain. Breakthrough. Create. Repeat.
That ain’t sustainable. And yet it is kinda how it is… kinda.
But I am beginning to recognize that when something does break me open, creation is often one of the ways God helps me metabolize it. Maybe that’s part of what the gift is for. Not merely making beautiful things after life becomes beautiful again.
Making meaning while something is still becoming.
Which Brings Me Back to Rewrite Fear and Rise
This entire experience is going into the book.
Of course it is.
At this point my characters probably need to start charging me therapy fees.
Rewrite Fear and Rise was already becoming something slightly unusual before this happened, and now I’m realizing it even more.
Yes, it’s a novel. There’s a protagonist. There’s a catalyst… and btw it’s a really good one ;)
There are characters and wounds and desires and choices and consequences and transformation… an all is lost that… well… you’ll just have to read it.
But underneath the fiction is also something experiential.
A framework. A journey. Questions.
Ideas I want the reader to live through rather than simply read about.
Almost like a transformational book hiding inside a novel. And I’m still discovering exactly what form that wants to take. Which actually makes me curious:
Would you read a novel that also invited you into the character’s transformation?
And if you’re wondering what I mean by that… I mean a real story that emotionally carries you somewhere, while quietly giving you tools to examine your own fears, beliefs, wounds and becoming along the way.
Because that’s increasingly what I think I’m building.
Maybe I need a new name for the form. Maybe somebody already has one.
Maybe we invent one.
Apparently I’m already doing that.
You May Not Be Losing Yourself
There’s one more thing I want to leave here because I needed it myself.
If you are going through one of these strange, disorienting seasons where parts of yourself suddenly don’t fit anymore, you may not be losing yourself.
You may be losing what you mistook for yourself.
There’s a difference. And yes, it can feel like shattering.
Because sometimes the shell and the self have been together so long that you can’t imagine one existing without the other.
Then the shell cracks. And somehow...
there you are.
Not gone. More present. More whole. More honest.
Maybe that’s the breakthrough beyond the breakthrough.
Not getting the thing, achieving the level, becoming more impressive.
But becoming more true.
There is a cost to the level up. Something usually has to be released. You may not understand why immediately. You may fight it. You’ll probably cry over it.
You might just God why He couldn’t possibly accomplish the same thing through some considerably less irritating method.
I certainly have.
But I’m beginning to see what God removes is not always evidence that He’s taking something from me. Sometimes He’s showing me what was taking me away from me.
And once I can see that...
I can finally let it go.
I pray God’s blessing over anyone currently standing inside their own breaking, becoming, releasing, or rising.
May He show you what is yours to carry and what was never yours in the first place. May you recognize yourself underneath everything that has been accumulated around you.
And may whatever’s shattering make room for something more whole.
In Jesus’ mighty name.
Amen.
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