Impermanence. Uncertainty. Surrender.

Living inside the almost, the maybe, the hopefully, and the anticipation.

My eleven and sixteen-year-old daughters are both laying on a pink and white checkered picnic blanket under the Callery pear tree behind the house. I’ve got a lot of work to do, but I can’t help but peak out the window from time to time and admire them, watch the sunlight and shadows dancing around them.

It’s summer of 2026 and we’re here in Charleston for a month while I spread myself as smoothly as I can across each day, trying as I might to accomplish it all. Writing, coaching, Curious Elixir sales, and marketing efforts, alongside dedicated and attentive time spent with these rapidly growing kids of mine.

It’s the year of the fire horse and from the get-go I honestly had no idea of what to expect for this year. Things have been thoroughly ‘up in the air’ - which for me - that’s really nothing new. Most of my life has been spent uncertain and waiting for the next potential maybe.

Photo by John Warg on Unsplash

Some people grow up in the same house, in the same town with all the same people and they stay there, and then they get married and raise their own kids in the same place. Their roots run deep and for most of my family that is absolutely the case.

My family has been in the same part of the world - in the same small towns in Indiana for generation after generation. It took me seven generations - on all four corners of my family tree to find the ancestors that crossed the Atlantic. They came over, found land, settled and stayed.

That has not been my story, however.

As a young girl, I remember flipping ravenously through the glossy pages of my grandmother’s National Geographic collection - which was vast. Inside those pages, I was introduced to the world that existed out of my own.

Besides my regular trips between northern Indiana and southern Indiana - and one weekend trip to Disney world in Florida, I had little to go on. My world view was predominantly Caucasian and blue collar with just a small glimpse inside the world of “small town upper class”.

Because of those National Geographics and a slowly growing education in geography and history (as well as a mother and grandmother that were very well read), my fascination with the ‘outside world’ was strong. Inside those magazines was another world entirely.

Different languages. Different skin colors. Different foods. Different landscapes. A different way of understanding life.

I became obsessed.

Looking back, I think I wasn’t just fascinated by other places. I was fascinated by possibility. I wanted to know what existed beyond the edges of the life I knew.

I wanted perspective. I wanted expansion, and if I’m being completely honest, I wanted to be different.

My family (because of my paternal mother’s sorority) was heavily involved in a yearly festival, called The Trail of Courage, or “Trail of Tears” which honored the Native Americans that once were marched across the country. It was often said in my family that we had Native blood, although that was never proven but I clung to it. I wanted so badly to be something ‘different’ something ‘unique and rare and exotic’ or at least exotic to me.

I heard the histories. I knew what had happened to natives, and I didn’t want to be associated fully with the ‘evil whites’

I was a preteen the first time I traveled out of the country. My father had a fascination with the tropics, and we took a family vacation to the US Virgin Islands.

Something I truly appreciate about my parents, is that they didn’t just ‘tourist’ - they dove into the culture. For example, one of my favorite memories of our time on St. John, was one night that we spent out on the beach playing with some local children. My mother and father were dancing at a small beachside bar while my brother and I played with the local kids, splashing around on the ocean shore and hopping from rock to rock in the moonlight. It was so beautiful sometimes I wonder if I dreamed it.

Besides that, it was in junior high that my desire to be different got louder. All of my friends were Hispanic, and I wanted so badly to fit in with them and be something — colorful, rare and special. So, I told everyone that my father was Italian and Hispanic. Somehow, I pulled it off.

Eventually the truth got out. Years later I would get my DNA tested and find out that not only was I entirely Caucasian but entirely eastern European and 26 percent Scandinavian. Which now, I can feel pride and joy in.

But what strikes me now is that the details almost don’t matter…

Whether I was searching through ancestry, geography, spirituality, relationships, or travel, I was asking the same question over and over again:

Who am I?

It’s no wonder that just two weeks after high school I caught a plane out of Indiana to join the military - which was supposed to be my ticket to the world. Rather - it was my ticket to Montana which - at first certainly felt like an entirely different country.

But that started my first true step into a world of bound to uncertainty. Into the constant shrug that came after every, “What’s next for you?” Any - when, where, who, how - question got answered with a “I have no clue but we will figure it out.”

I have lived in Indiana, Texas, Montana, Iraq, North Carolina, Scotland, South Korea, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, New York City, and most of them multiple times - going back and forth and in between. I don’t know for sure how many addresses I have had but I know for sure it’s more than 30.

I’ve packed and unpacked my life so many times that I sometimes wonder if impermanence has become its own kind of home for me.

And yet, despite all the movement, I still crave roots. I crave a home. A place where I don’t have to wonder what’s next.

But… I also crave MORE. I ache for new places, new perspectives, new conversations, new ways of seeing and feeling and being in this world. I crave being inside those glossy National Geographic photographs and stories.

I am constantly aching for travel and hope to see more and more of this beautiful world and not in a touristy way - but in a hungry for more connection, more wonder, more understanding, hungry for the reminder that my way is not the only way.

Maybe that’s why this season feels so familiar. Because… Here I am again, living inside uncertainty. Inside the almost, the maybe, the anticipation of something I cannot yet see.

If you’re with me here, you know that I use memoir as excavation, and not because I want to write about the past, but because I am trying to understand the present and work toward a future that is in true alignment with the highest expression of my soul.

I am in a transition phase… I believe we all are… standing somewhere between what was and what will be.

For years I thought uncertainty was a temporary condition. A hallway. A bridge. A season to endure until clarity arrived.

Now I am realizing that uncertainty is simply part of being alive.

This summer feels like a waiting room — a place where one version of your life is ending while the next version has not yet introduced itself.

I have spent much of my life here, and maybe that’s why memoir calls to me. When I write, I begin to see patterns.

I see the little girl flipping through National Geographic magazines, longing for a bigger world. I see the teenager desperate to become someone interesting, someone different, someone special. I see myself constantly boarding airplanes and chasing horizons.

I see decades of moving, leaving, arriving, and beginning again. More than thirty addresses, each an opportunity to reinvent myself, and beneath all of it, the same lesson repeating:

Life has never asked me to know what comes next. Only to take the next step.

Photo by Becca Lavin on Unsplash

These days, grief sits beside me often.

My grandmother is gone. My father is navigating illness while carrying a grief of his own. One of my closest friends is dying… not suddenly, not mercifully, slowly. The kind of dying that asks everyone around it to witness what they cannot fix. The kind that breaks your heart over and over again.

I find myself wrestling with the unfairness of it all.

How can someone so vibrant disappear? How can a body betray a person so completely? How can a family be asked to carry so much?

I don’t have answers, but what I do have is a continual return to faith.

Not certainty.

Faith.

Watching someone die has a way of stripping away illusion. The petty concerns fall away. The masks become harder to wear. The urgency of being fully alive becomes impossible to ignore.

Maybe that is why I find myself craving life so fiercely.

Not happiness. Not perfection.

Life.

The whole thing! The ache, the beauty, the heartbreak, the wonder, the romance. To remain enchanted by existence itself. To watch the sunlight, play in my daughter’s hair, to hear them laugh, to chase them along the beach and swim in the ocean at sunset. To share my story, here and with you.

Every day, yes, I am getting the things done and working toward my dreams, that ‘one daydream’, while also allowing myself to be moved by music, poetry, art, and the sheer miracle of being here at all.

I want that kind of romance. The kind that belongs to life itself.

The older I get, the more I realize that certainty was never the prize. Presence is.

Not knowing what comes next has never stopped life from happening. In fact, some of the most beautiful chapters have emerged from circumstances I never would have chosen or predicted.

So, for now, I remain here.

In the becoming, and in the sacred and uncomfortable space between endings and beginnings. Writing. Remembering. Excavating. Trusting that if I keep digging honestly enough, I won’t just uncover who I have been. I will discover who I truly deeply am as the highest most fully expressed version of my soul in this body.

And every now and then, I’ll stop mid-sentence, push back from my desk, and peek out the window.

My girls are still out there under the pear tree. The light is shifting. One of them is laughing at something the other said.

This is the work too. All of it. The writing and the watching and the showing up and the not-yet-knowing. This is the life I am trying to be fully alive inside of. Right here. Right now. In the waiting room.

Thanks again for being here with me. Please share this, and I will see you next week.

If you are looking for community, connection, and affordable coaching, please consider joining us inside The Caim Circle.

If you know you are ready to FINALLY write and publish your book, reach out. I’ve got you.

xx Jessa