This week has been a big one.

I've been emotionally exposed, fearful and sad in ways I don't always let myself fully be. Wading through the slew of heavy feelings in my gumboots rather than jumping over the torrent got me thinking.

I talk a lot about connecting to inner resources as a path to hope. About finding the ground beneath you when things feel uncertain – I definitely believe in that.

But this week I noticed its shadow.

I have a habit of racing to resilience – and I think it might be doing more harm than good. Like toxic positivity, or false hope, it's a path that looks like strength but can take us away from the deep, true, sustained kind of wellbeing we're actually after. When we keep aiming for recovery – for getting back to functional, back to stable – we can accidentally skip the very work the emotions are trying to do. The big business of supporting us to digest change and loss.

This week I met an internal tipping point. I let the fear really arrive. I went deep into the scenarios I'd been avoiding in the name of inner peace. I broke down. Where I might normally have reached for a powerful reframe, I let myself feel the loss instead. The longing. The rage. The grief. I let it all come.

It wasn't comfortable. But something shifted that wouldn't have shifted any other way. I realised I'd been holding – holding in, holding on – when what I really needed was to let go. To be washed downstream, to feel forces bigger than me put me in my place.

Here's what I'm sitting with: what if the emotions we rush past aren't obstacles to hope – but the season it grows in?

Decomposition isn't failure. It's how renewal actually works. The breaking-open moment, when we trust it enough to stay in it, is how the light gets in. It's how we become fertile ground for wisdom to take root and flower. You can't get there by staying in the kernel – you have to let the storm move through, swell your shell, and crack you open.

In some ways I wish I'd let myself tip earlier. All the hard work of holding takes enormous effort. And there's something on the other side of fully feeling that you simply cannot get to any other way.

So this isn't an argument against resilience. It's an argument for attending to the season – for noticing when the rush to recover is actually a rush away from something important. For trusting that falling apart, when you're ready, might be the most generative thing you can do.

Hope isn't always found by getting back up quickly. Sometimes it arrives in the breaking open.

I wonder if this applies beyond the personal too. In Aotearoa NZ this year, communities have faced one climate event after another. We talk a lot about community resilience – but perhaps communities need to grieve as well. To attend emotionally to what has been lost, before racing back to functional. The same shadow might fall there too.

Just a thought.

So if you needed any sense of permission – feel free to break down, and stay down for as long as it takes for your seed of hope to find true ground.

More soon. Take care of yourselves out there.

X Megan

P.S Did this resonate? I don’t ask for payment, but I would appreciate your support to grow my reach for The Hope Dispatch – can you please share this with another other person who might be seeking a more generous, peaceful and inclusive future? 

P.P.S I offer Strategic Coaching and Communications Support services to leaders in the For-Purpose/Impact space. Is there a leader you know who is overwhelmed and needing some support? Put us in touch : )