Chapter 34 - YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW F*CKING DANGEROUS YOU ARE

Chapter 34 - YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW F*CKING DANGEROUS YOU ARE 

What if the version of yourself you’ve been mourning… was never the final version of you?

In this deeply powerful episode of Burn It Down and Begin Again, Erica explores what it truly means to become “dangerous” — not reckless, not destructive, but emotionally resilient, self-aware, and impossible to control by fear, shame, or limitation.

Through raw storytelling, psychology, neuroscience, and personal transformation, Erica breaks down the concept of the liminal space — that painful in-between season where your old identity is falling apart, but your new self hasn’t fully formed yet. From Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell to neuroplasticity, trauma growth, and nervous system rewiring, this episode explains why feeling lost is often the clearest sign that transformation is happening.

If you’ve ever felt disconnected from yourself, uncertain about your future, stuck in survival mode, or afraid to let go of who you used to be, this conversation will remind you that confusion is not failure — it’s construction.

This is about becoming the kind of person who can no longer be broken by what once almost destroyed them.

Because dangerous people aren’t born in comfort.
 They are forged in the fire. 

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Transcript

Erica 0:00

You have no idea how dangerous you are. I mean that. You're walking around in your regular life, going to work, posting about your food, your kids, your dog, your little victories, your bad days, and you have absolutely no idea of what you're actually capable of. And I'm not talking about potential in some motivational poster type of way. I'm talking about the fact that you have already survived things that were supposed to stop you, things that stopped other people. And you're still here, still thinking, still showing up, and still figuring it out. That's not ordinary. That is the beginning of dangerous. Dangerous isn't loud, it isn't aggressive, it isn't reckless. Dangerous is the person who has been through enough that they cannot be threatened by the things that most people are afraid of. Dangerous is the person whose mind is sharp because life has sharpened it. Dangerous is the person who stopped letting other people's opinions write their story, who started forming their own beliefs based on what they've actually lived, learned, and felt, and not who is moved by the noise. Dangerous is the person who understands they are always becoming, that they can change it at any time, from anywhere, no matter how far gone it feels. That person is you. Today we're talking about exactly how you do that, how you take everything that has confused you, broken you, lost you, and you turn it into the most powerful version of yourself that you have ever been. Stay with me. This one's for you. Welcome to Burn It Down and Begin Again, because sometimes the only way out is through the fire. My name is Erica, and this is my story, told one chapter at a time. Not to relive the pain, but to reclaim the power that was buried beneath it. I share it boldly because I know I'm not the only one. Too many of us carry stories like mine of trauma, silence, survival, and shame alone. But healing isn't just about surviving what hurt us. It's about becoming the women we were meant to be, how we can transform pain into purpose and rebuild life on our own terms to show what is possible when we rise to the strongest version of ourselves. If you hear yourself in my words, know this. You're not crazy, you're not broken, and you're definitely not alone. This podcast is part of Chicology. Real women, real stories, and real transformation. We're here to break cycles, rise higher, and create lives that radiate power, purpose, and passion. So if you've walked through hell and you're ready to grow, evolve, and rebuild, then stay with me. There's hope here, there's healing here, and there's an army of us rising with you. Now, let's begin. Hi guys, this is Erica. You would never know it. You look at my life from the outside and you see an average woman, right? And I post about my plants, I post about what I'm cooking, my kids, my dog, my health journey, my opinions, the trips I go on. I go to work, I come home, I walk my dog. I look completely ordinary. But make no mistake, I am dangerous. And not because I'm reckless, not because I'm aggressive, but because I have survived things like you have that would have taken most people out and I'm still standing. Because my mind is sharp and I know how to use it, because I pay attention when most people are sleepwalking. I do form my own opinions based on what I've actually studied and lived, and I'm challenging you to do the same. I do not buy into what somebody's handed me, and I'm not moved by other people's noise, not at all. And you want to know what the most dangerous thing about me is? I am always becoming, because I am. I can change myself and my thoughts anytime I want. I am not anchored into a version of myself that no longer serves me, guys, and I was for a long time. I shed and grow and I shed again, and nothing about that scares me anymore. And it used to. Change is the norm, right? And that is actually what is exciting to me at this stage in my life. That is what makes somebody dangerous. And here's what I want you to understand. You can be too. Not someday, not after you fix everything that feels broken, but I'm talking about right now in the middle of your mess, in the middle of this lost phase that you may be in, and in the middle of not knowing maybe who you are yet. Because dangerous people are not built in comfort, you guys. Cotton candy lives do not build tough people. They don't build people that are layered with life experience. They just basically build a bunch of Stepford wives, right? Those women, those people that we admire that are strong, they are built in moments that almost broke them. And that's what I want to talk about today. So today's episode has been sitting with me for a while. And I came across this video on social media. It was really simple, but it was talking about how feeling lost is part of becoming dangerous. And it kind of explored the concept, and I loved it, and I kept kind of turning it over in my mind because I have been that lost, and I can honestly tell you that even though it was horrible, that is what made me who I am today. I am a woman who lives in the ordinary world of, like I said, cooking and my little life and my dog and my little activities and my friends and my hobbies and all of that, and you know, paying the bills, all those things. But I'm also a woman who is a very deep thinker who's been through a lot. And that combination has made me somebody who is able to influence, for example, my kids. They look to me for guidance. They respect what I've been through, they respect me. There's a lot of people that are around you or me that maybe are struggling in life. And when you show up in life with that much authenticity and that much power, people start paying attention. This podcast came out of exactly that place from darkness, from brokenness, from a version of me that I genuinely didn't know if I was gonna make it out to the other side. And I do not have a clean journey. I have a lot of scars, but man, I made it. And what got built from the rubble is what I am the most proud of more than anything else in my life, because my life looks intact, but man, I gotta tell you, it certainly was not. So this is for every person, every woman who feels too broken to fix or maybe really lost right now. Maybe you feel too lost to find your way, maybe you feel like it's too late to start over. I am living proof that none of those things is true. I am proof, you guys. And if you're new here, welcome. I'm really glad you found this podcast. And if you've been riding with me here for a while, you already know that I don't waste your time with fluff. We get real here. So uh by the way, if you can do me one favor before we go any further, if today's episode hits uh and you want to share it with somebody, please take a few minutes and share it with somebody. Take a moment to leave me a rating, some stars. That's how this show gets found by women who need it most when the algorithm picks it up. 30 seconds, so you could be somebody else's turning point, guys. So if you could do that, I appreciate it. As always, you know, I start with a challenge of the week, and you guys have kind of been with me on my health journey. So my challenge of the week is getting my shit together again. I was out of work for quite some time. I had one respiratory situation after another. I won't go into explaining it again, but excuse me, there you go. I am healing and I'm back to work tomorrow. I am very excited to go back to work, but I'm also a little nervous because I have been out for a while and I'm worried about my stamina. Where I'm at right now, uh, I've been building it all week. So all week I've been going out and doing a couple little errands and then coming home and napping. And building that stamina is a real thing. And it's kind of humbling because, you know, I am a person that can go hard all day long, and that has just not been me as of late, of course, while I'm healing. So uh that has been a big part of my week this week is just getting myself kind of built up so I can reacclimate into the work system. I will let you guys know, but that is my challenge of the week is trying to get back to a level of operation where I feel like I can really be of service to my team members there at work and not kill myself in the process. So let's start with today's podcast, right? There's a word I want you to know. It is liminal. It comes from the Latin word limin, which means threshold, and that is the space in between. It is a doorway that you've already stepped through, but you haven't fully crossed yet. So there's an anthropologist named Arnold Van Genup, and he wrote about it in the early 1900s. Uh, he was studying the rites of passage across cultures, what happens when a person transitions from one stage of life to another? He noticed something really consistent across every culture and every era. The transition always included a middle phase or a chaos phase, a a no longer who you were and not ready to be who you're becoming yet phase, right? Liminal. That's what he called it. Victor Turner built on that work decades later and described it as being betwixt and between, right? Not here or not there. Stripped of your old identity, but not yet wearing the new one in the process of becoming. So when you are in it and when you are in that liminal space, it does not feel like evolution. It really does feel like failure. It feels like confusion. It feels like something has gone terribly wrong with your life and you're questioning everything. And what do most people do when they hit that stage? They run back to what is familiar. They go back to the relationship that wasn't working, they go back to the job that they hate, they go back to the version of themselves that uh at least they could explain to people, right? Because familiar pain, it feels safer than unfamiliar growth. And that's a very common uh psychological thing. I did it, guys, more than once. But here's what it costs you it keeps you stuck in a cycle. You can make it to the threshold every time, and then you retreat, and nothing changes. And that liminal space in between, it does not go away. It just waits there and it's gonna keep calling you back until you finally have the guts to cross through it. William Bridges wrote a book called Transitions. It's a great book, making sense of life's changes. And he made this distinction that genuinely changed how I see things. He talked about how there's a difference between change and transition. A change, for example, would be external, like a divorce, a job loss, a diagnosis, moving to someplace else. A transition is actually what happens inside of you in response to that change. A transition always starts with an ending every single time before anything new can begin. Something old has to die. And sometimes it's catastrophic and sometimes it's quiet. He called it the neutral zone, and it's kind of a dead space. That kind of I don't know who I am right now space, and I'm sure you guys know exactly what I'm talking about. That is the liminal stage, and it's nothing to be afraid of, but it is the most dangerous stage. That is where most people misread their emotions and they feel like they're falling apart, but that is actually the beginning of becoming. Let's talk about what's actually happening neurologically when you are in this place. Because I think once you understand this, you will look at your own confusion differently. You'll never look at it the same way. And this is why my study into when I started to get well, I did visit like psychologists and psychiatrists, and I did all this, and it kind of gave me an idea for mapping. But being a deep thinker, I wanted to get every book I could on cognitive behavioral therapy and what makes us tick. And I began to really research. You don't have to do that. It's so easy now with things like AI that you can pull up something that interests you, or even describe to AI what your current situation is, ask for some reading topics. It's really incredible. I'm gonna do an episode actually on AI probably next week because a lot of people don't know how to use it and it can be such a great tool. But at any rate, your brain operates on neural pathways, habits of thought and patterns of behavior. We call it identity, but they all have a literal physical pathway that's carved into your neural tissue. And we've talked about neuroplasticity, right? The ability to change those pathways. Joe Dispenza, Freedom. But the more you repeat things, the deeper those grooves get. Your brain loves efficiency and it's always going to go back to what is familiar. These are kind of default, and that's the thing you're gonna go to first because they are familiar and they can serve energy literally on a biological level in your body. But when you start to grow, when life kind of forces you into a new version of yourself and you're getting dragged along, those old pathways have to be disrupted. They have to break down so new ones can form. Neuroplasticity. Neuroscientists call this synaptic pruning. That is the term. And the brain literally eliminates old connections to make room for new ones. So what it feels like is disorientation, anxiety, the sense that you've lost your footing. You can't think your way through things anymore like you used to be able to. Maybe you just feel like you've got a lot of brain fog, or you get to a certain place and all of a sudden you just can't push past it. This feeling of panic is taking over. Old coping mechanisms stop working and you don't trust your own instincts anymore. Man, have I been there. People interpret that as a mental health crisis or a personality flaw, but it is neither. It is actually a neurological like reorganization, right? Your brain is rebuilding its architecture. So, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, she is a neuroscientist who I followed. She studies how the brain constructs emotion. And she talks about how the brain is a prediction machine. It literally runs constantly on past experience to predict the present. Okay. So it pulls up all those past experiences and will give you a quick layout on what's in front of you. So when you're transforming, those predictions actually stop working. So the old map really no longer matches the new territory. And your brain begins to respond with what she calls a prediction error, which is the state of alertness, oftentimes distress is how it feels. It's very distressing, where essentially your body, your mind, everything is screaming, I don't have a template for this, right? And you start to feel really panicky. That discomfort is not a sign that you're broken, though. And a lot of people misinterpret it as that. It is actually a sign that you're beginning something new and your brain is rewriting a new code. And the writing process, guys, can be really, really messy. It's very important that we reassure ourselves during that time that we're in the process of becoming. There's also something called cognitive dissidence, which is the friction that we feel when we're holding two conflicting identities at the same time. The old one still has a lot of pull, but the new one, it isn't fully formed yet. And if you can get through that little no man's land, you're going to come out on the other side. Because the people who actually sit with it, who burn, you know, without retreating, those are the ones that come out on the other side different. So you are allowed to have been completely certain about something in life, a belief or a decision, an identity, a version of God, a version of yourself, and then change your mind. That can be really hard because I really thought I had it all figured out at one point in time. Everything was stripped from me. And I had to realize that I really knew nothing. You hear a lot of people talking about this in transformative situations that happen. And I think it's important to say it it's not weakness, it's not instability. I have a lot of women that I talk to that are my age and they feel like they're floating. Their kids have grown, they're in a shit relationship or their marriage sucks and they've lost their friends and they're floating around and they don't know who the fuck they are anymore. That is common. And you guys, this is where we have to embrace the fact that we get to choose who we want to be. That literally can be sitting down with a piece of paper and being like, you know what? If I could picture my life, how I'd like to live it, the things that I would like to believe and stand for, whatever, put it down on a piece of paper. You can create that life. One of the most damaging things I think we do to ourselves is to treat our current opinions like they're permanent. Like once we've decided something, changing that position means that we were wrong somehow in the past. That means that what? We're less credible somehow or less trustworthy. We can't trust ourselves less together. So we begin to defend these positions that we've already outgrown because the alternative feels like admitting failure. And it's not. That's just the process of becoming. That is the ego basically protecting itself. You've got to get past that. Your opinions are supposed to change with life experience. They're supposed to evolve as you gather new information and new experiences and versions of yourself. So something like a belief that you held at 30 no longer fits at 50, and that's normal. It's not a mistake. It's just evidence that you grew. The only people whose opinions never change are the people who stopped growing. And I know a few of those for sure. You've got to be honest about what you know, but you have to be equally honest about what you don't know. It's okay to be like, I don't know. That is one of the most powerful things you can say to yourself because it means that your mind is still open. And a closed mind, guys, is a comfortable mind, but there's no such thing, uh there's no such thing as growth without getting uncomfortable. A comfortable mind stops evolving. And I don't want to be that person, right? So you've got to own your own current truth, right? Hold it with conviction and stay willing to release it, though, when the moment comes along where you feel a truth strike you in your heart, where you understand that that is something you're gonna assimilate into your belief system, right? That fluidity, that willingness to be wrong, to update, to shed an old belief is the same way that a snake sheds its skin. And it's part of what makes somebody dangerous because they can't be trapped by their own rigidity. Let's say that again. They can't be trapped by their own rigidity. They move, they adapt, and they keep becoming. Carl Young, who is one of my favorites, as you know, he called it individuation. And it is the central project or was of his entire life's work. It is the process by which a person becomes fully, authentically themselves, not their self that their parents shaped, or the self that their culture demanded, or what social media says, or the self that they performed for for the people around them, or who their kids expect them to be. Because there's all versions of ourselves, right? That we we that's part of us. But I'm talking about our actual inner self. And Young was super clear. Individuation is not comfortable. It requires confronting what he calls the shadow self, which is parts of yourself that you buried or denied or suppressed, uh, the parts that told you you were too much or too loud or too damaged or that nobody could love you, too broken to be acceptable to other people, whatever your story is, right? That lost phase, that confused, unmoored, nothing fits phase is often just the shadow surfacing, right? Those parts of you that were never allowed to exist, you never permitted them to exist because you didn't feel safe, they're finally pushing through. And that's really disorienting. And I think it's really important to understand, guys, that we are constantly changing. And the easiest thing to do, and I've done it myself, when everything becomes too much and you become overwhelmed by feeling lost, you just shut down. And that's okay to shut down here and there. I mean, I've certainly done it. There are times where I'm like, you know what, I'm going through this right now. I can't think about this at this moment. I'm gonna think about this tomorrow, but I'm gonna take a nap now or I'm gonna do this now. Because you know, you're you're allowed to take a time out, but it is really important that you don't run from this. So, James Hollis, another great author, wrote a book called Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life. I do recommend if you're struggling that you read it. So if you are in midlife, read this book. He talks about how the second half of life almost always begins with a rupture, something that forces you uh to stop living the life that you constructed and that you really believed that was real for yourself, and start asking who you actually are beneath all this construction that has been built up by systems, by the people that raised you, by belief systems, by social media, by you know, all of these versions of ourself that exist within the one body of our true self. And he calls it the invitation of the second half because the first half, you're busy building. Okay, my best friend is busy building. She asks a lot of questions, but she's busy building. She's got young kids, right? You survived that, right? You achieved, you performed, whatever. Now the second half really is about shedding. It's about letting go of things, it's about letting go of friendships that no longer serve you. It's about letting go of versions of yourself that no longer serve you. It's about deciding who the fuck you want to be. Who do you want to be? If you're not happy with who you are, that is the only question you should be asking yourself. Who do you want to be? I am this crazy mix of the lady that, you know, who knows how people see me. Somebody sent me this really cute like uh video, and I think it must have reminded him of me, where there's this guy that does this Instagram thing where he, you know, stands out in the street with a sword and he kind of you know gets people's responses. And he says, Well, you come fight for the knights of the seven kingdom on the wall, and you get people's responses. And this lady, she's going home with her two dogs and her groceries, she's dressed really funny, and she kind of has this funny reaction. She goes, Oh, no, no, I will not fight. You know, she's got this great accent, but I I I love people, I want to feed people. And he said, In this video, it's great, it was just really real. He's like, You feed people? She's like, Yeah, you know, my husband's Mexican, he loves to eat, she's got this great accent, she's wearing this awesome hat, her dogs are there. She's like, Come for dinner, I'm making Mexican food. And he's like, Can I bring something? And she's like, Oh, no, no, no. He's like, I'll bring a pumpkin pie. And they actually closed the video with him and this lady, you know, just when he met having dinner with the family. She just invited him over. But I think that's kind of how people see me. You know, I do feed the folks at work. I know my kids see me as a source of love and you know, all that. But I am so much more than that. I'm this balance between little things, you know, paying my bills, doing what I'm supposed to be doing, being responsible and having integrity, a love of planting in my garden, my backyard at night with all my little silly fairy lights everywhere, cooking, traveling, building new businesses, like all these things, very much of the world, right? But in my head, I actually have the two sides of me, right? I have this very physical side of me where like I'm very physically involved in the world and people, and I invest in the people around me and my relationships and very normal, average person if you looked at my life. But then in my head, I'm fucking fierce, right? There's the Spock side of my mentality where I can shut off emotion, I can look at things from that bird's eye view. We've talked about the tree, right? The analogy of the Tree, if you're standing on the ground looking at a tree, you only see so much. But if you're a bird flying above it, now you see the tree and everything around the tree. And if you're a plane and if you're a satellite, right? It goes on and on. I am in that mode and I can switch very easily and become very analytical. And I have this huge inner world of thoughts and crazy things in my head. And I think that is one of the things that I love most about my life right now is that I can be all of those things and I don't have to have any fucking excuses. I'm not raising a family anymore. Yeah, I'm busy, but my time is mine, and I get to own every part of who I am and I get to decide who I'm gonna be. I think that this is so great that we have an invitation in our second half that we can do that. It's not a crisis. Campbell spent his whole life talking about that book mapping the hero's journey. Okay, that's what we're on, the hero's journey across every culture and mythology that he could study. And he identified that the most critical and dangerous moment in every hero's story is not the dragon or the battle, it's the descent, the dark forest, the belly of the whale. That's like when the old self dies and the new self begins to be forged. So if you are feeling lost, this is part of the deal, guys. Every hero in every story goes through that lost phase. Don't forget that, every single one. And the ones who refuse, Campbell called it the refusal of the call, they never become who they were meant to be. They live smaller lives, then quietly haunt them. And then, you know, they end up at the end of their life with all those regrets, right? You are not in your story's lowest point. You're at the crucible. And unless you decide to just give up and give in, this is the place where everything is being forged and that metal becomes something new. Only from fires can swords be forged. You got to remember that. There is a body of research called post-traumatic growth. I'm sure you've heard of it, very common, but it was developed by psychologists uh Richard Tajeski, and I've talked about him before, and Lawrence Calhoun. I think it was a couple episodes I talked about them in the mid-90s. And it's one of the most important under-discussed areas of psychology, really, this premise that human beings don't just survive trauma. Under the correct or right conditions, they grow because of it. And women are more likely to grow with this. The growth exceeds anything that they would have reached without it. It's not a metaphor that this is something measured and documented and replicated. They've watched it across many, many, many studies. The domains that they found people grew in were specifically personal strength, uh, new possibilities, relating to other people better, appreciation for life, spiritual or existential change. So people who went through loss or illness or betrayal, collapse, and they came out on the other side, consistently reported higher levels of meaning and authentic living than before the event that broke them. And a thousand percent that's true for me. Frankel, Victor Frankel, somebody else I've talked about before, he was a survivor of Ashwood's. He lost his wife, his family, everything. And from that, from the absolute worst thing that possibly could happen to a human being, he built a framework for meaning. He wrote that the last of the human freedoms is the ability to choose your attitude in any given set of circumstances. That is so powerful, you guys. That between stimulus and the response, there's a space. That in between stimulus and response, there's a space. And that space, in that space, you're going to find your power. That is the liminal zone. That is that lost place. That is the space where you get to choose. And it's normal to feel anxious or scared or disoriented or confused. But you got to remember that is the no man's land that you must walk through to get to the other side. Uh, Dr. Edith Eager was also a Holocaust survivor. And she wrote the choice. And her central thesis is that the greatest prison that we live in is the one inside our own minds. Oh my God, how true is that? Freedom does not come from perfect circumstances, but from the decision to stop being a victim of your own story and start being the author of it. She was 90 years old when her book became a bestseller, guys. 90. It is never too late. There is a concept that runs through Buddhism and stoicism, and I want to bring a little bit of this in here now because I really relate to this. Most wisdom traditions, and we do call them that wisdom traditions, have survived for thousands of years. And this is basically what they all allude to. Everything is temporary. The pain, the confusion, the loss, right? The lost nest. But also, this is the part we conveniently forget, you guys, the beautiful things too. The people, the season of life you're in right now, the health you have, the relationships that feel solid, the moments that feel easy, all of it is temporary. Be grateful for every single fucking moment. That is not a dark thought, guys. That is one of the most freeing thoughts available to the human mind if you really take the time to let it land. So when you're suffering, the brain, it does something really specific, right? It projects that current state forward indefinitely and it makes you believe somehow this is how it's always going to be. Not that it's just a moment, a breath, right? That's not a fact. That's the nervous system in survival mode, trying to prepare you for the worst. And that is not the truth. The truth is that the feeling you're in right now, whether it's that you're lost, unmoored, floating, empty, it's a phase. It's transitional. The moment that you can anchor into that, the moment that you can hold on to this is not permanent, this is not who I am, this is just where I'm at right now. You gotta stop fighting the current situation and just move through it. Understand it's temporary. When we obsess over how we feel in the middle of a transition, we keep ourselves in it longer, not because we're weak, but because that's just how the brain works. What you focus on, you amplify. We've talked about this manifestation. It's all these principles that we've discussed week after week after week. What you give your attention to and your energy to, what you give your energy to, that is what is going to be prevalent and true for you. The antidote, you know, this is backed by neuroscience just as much as ancient philosophy. Right back to what I've been telling you guys is gratitude, not Instagram gratitude, not the gratitude journal where you write three things down and feel nothing. But I'm talking about that meditational practice we talked about last week, and many times I've talked about it. Real gratitude, where you really get real with yourself and you go through your huge list of every single thing that you can think of to be grateful for, you know, and if you do this and you really feel the feelings, you stop wherever you're at in your head, where that madness is going on, and something begins to register, and you can pull yourself out of a shit moment with gratitude meditation, guys. Think about what you appreciate. Your kids, your health. My God, do I appreciate my health now more than ever? You know, the fact that your heart is beating, that you have a job, your lungs are working, your dog, you woke up this morning, your wonderful meal that you're gonna eat, the plans you have for the day, your friends, whatever. These things are not small things. We just treat them like small things because we've had them long enough to stop seeing them. Practicing impermanence, truly sitting with the fact that none of this is guaranteed and it's all a gift, it does something measurable to your nervous system. It activates that parasympathetic system, it lowers your cortisol, and it shifts you out of that threat response into the present moment. That is not a metaphor, guys. That is physiology. A Buddhist teacher, uh, I always struggle with this name. It's Teach Nathan. I don't know if that's right, but he's awesome. Said the most precious gift we can offer anyone is our full attention, and that includes ourselves, guys. The act of pausing and recognizing what is actually good in your life or real right now, or taking a moment. Like last night, I was in my yard and I put up these little solar lights, and I was so grateful for the beauty and the peace of my backyard, and then I'm beginning to be feeling better, and then I have a job to go back to, and all of these things, and then you know, I had my kids to walk me through this time where I wasn't feeling good. I held on to those things, and man, I went to bed just feeling amazing. You do not have to pretend though, guys, that everything is fine. You can hold two things at once. I'm grateful for all of these things, and this sucks, right? This is really hard, but this is still great, you know. That dual awareness is actually what's going to keep you from drowning in the season that you're in. Do not forget that pain is temporary. Confusion, guys, it's temporary. Not knowing who you are, it's temporary. Don't forget that. Temporary. It just doesn't feel that way when you're in it, when you're panicking. And also remember that temporary also is the time that you have the people you love. The window of health and energy and possibility that you're standing in right now, that can change at any given moment. Be fucking grateful. The chance to make choices that matter most. You are standing at that right now. You can do that. All of it moves and all of it changes. That is not a reason to grieve or be panicky. It is a reason to be fully present and here right now, even if right now is uncomfortable. Especially, I'm gonna say, when it's uncomfortable, because this moment is truly building something. I want to come back to the word dangerous, okay? Not because I'm talking about reckless. I'm not talking about reckless or destructive. I'm talking about dangerous in a way that can't be predicted or controlled by people who need to have you small. Dangerous people are the ones who have been through enough that they're no longer afraid of the thing that most people are afraid of. They've already looked at the worst case scenario because they've lived it. They've lived through the loss, the failure, you know, humiliation, heartbreak, and they're still standing, you know, maybe addiction, maybe death. That is what makes them dangerous. They can't be threatened by the things they've already survived. I'm gonna go even further, and I said it before, but what makes you dangerous is when you are truly living in that authenticity, you become a beacon. People feel something different around you. They know that you're living in authenticity and they want a little bit of that, and that makes you influential. Okay, and that makes you influential to create good in the world around you. Don't forget that. Look at your own life for a second. Look at what you've already come through. I look at mine all the time, not in a reflective bad way, but like, man, look at what I came through and look at what I built. I'm freaking proud of you, Erica. Good job, right? Things that were supposed to take you out, things that were supposed to take me out, the nights that I did not think that I would get through, the drinking, all the shit I didn't think I'd get through, all the stuff you guys thought you couldn't get through, you did. The versions of yourself that you had to let die to get here to where you are. You're still here. You're still here, guys. And if you don't feel dangerous, that is dangerous. You know, Brene Brown, one of my favorites, uh, her research on what she calls wholeheartedness, uh, the people who are living fully, loving without armor, and showing up uh for real, you know, she found that they all had one thing in common. They made a deliberate choice to embrace uncertainty. Not to like it. There's nothing that says you have to like it, not to be comfortable with it either, right? But to stop treating it as the enemy and start treating it as the price of admission to a real life, not a cotton candy life, a real life. I recommend you read her book, The Gifts of Imperfection. It is awesome and it is essentially a manual for how to stop running from that loss phase that you're in and start mining it like it was gold for everything that it has to give you. Such a great book. So don't forget that the people that come out of chaos with something worth having, those are the ones who stopped fighting the lostness and started asking what it was trying to show them. That's the move, you guys. That is the whole move. So how do you do that? What do you do when you're in it, when you're in the middle of the chaos and you can't see the other side yet? First, stop trying to fix it too fast. We all want to do that, right? That impulse we have to immediately resolve the discomfort, make a decision just to end the uncertainty. So we just don't want to feel it anymore. It often sends people straight into kind of what they left behind. They just end up getting so overwhelmed they go back to what they left. They sit in that neutral zone for too long and they are afraid of crossing over that threshold. And so they just go back. You have to be able to understand you're in that threshold point. The other thing is you have to learn to tell the difference between discomfort and danger. That should be pretty obvious, but it's actually not for a lot of people. Your nervous system are going to treat both the same in your head, that fight or flight, they are not the same thing. Being unsettled is not the same thing as being unsafe. That distinction, we have to sometimes remind ourselves because if we're just feeling unsettled, we feel like everything is wrong and everything is unsafe. That is a lie. That distinction is one of the most important things that you can develop during your transformation, that acknowledgement. You also have to get intentional about what you're feeding your mind. What are you reading? What are you listening to? Which shows are you watching to? Who are you talking to? You know, the lost phase is when the subconscious is actually the most open and malleable. So if you're putting crap into your subconscious, that's what you're gonna get back. It can be an asset or a liability, right? Depending on what you're feeling, feeding it. You've got to point towards where you're going. And that includes everything that you consume physically, mentally, spiritually, all of it. You've got to point in that direction. Do not focus on what has been keeping you anchored. Focus on feeding yourself stuff that's feeding the future and the vision that you have for yourself. Also, super important, find one person who has been through their own fire and come out on the other side. It could be me, my voice. You don't know me, but hey, it could be me. It could be somebody who you just meet, it could be somebody who you know, not somebody who's had a nice, comfy life. I know those guys too. Not somebody who's gonna try and talk you out of the process that you're in because your chaos makes them uncomfortable. Somebody who can sit in your fire with you without flinching because they know exactly what it produces. Somebody that understands this firsthand. And I do recommend documenting it. You know, if you don't want to write it in a journal, use your notes on your phone. Uh, just blah, blah, blah. You know, how do you feel? Write it down, record yourself, whatever, whatever works. Because the person that you are becoming is gonna need to look back in this chapter and understand what it costs to get there. And also, there's something extremely cathartic about getting out how you truly feel your innermost thoughts. And I I gotta be honest, I don't write it anymore. I used to, it takes too long. I actually input it into AI and a journal and use it to kind of wherever I'm at, I'll ramble, you know, and AI will help me come up with the cohesiveness of what is it that I'm actually getting at. And it might even point out to me, okay, you've talked about all of these different things, but your real focus is here. And I'm like, oh wow, boom, light bulb. Yes, we're gonna talk about that. Like I said, I'm gonna do an episode on AI because you really people are saying, you know, oh, AI, it's bad. Yeah, could be probably, but honestly, it's what the one of the best tools I've ever used. And if you're not using it, you're missing out in so many ways. So let me just bring it back around, guys. We're gonna close out, but I want you to walk away understanding that feeling lost is not a failure. It's not a weakness, it is not a sign that you took a wrong turn. It is the biological, neurological, psychological, and deeply human signal that you are in the middle of becoming someone new. Don't forget that. That liminal space, the in-between, has been every part of the transition, every initiation, every rite of passage across every culture and person in human history who has grown. You are not an exception to that pattern. It just feels like you are because you're living it. Your brain is not malfunctioning, it feels like it, but it's rewriting. And that rewiring, the confusion, that disorientation, that sense that the old map doesn't match the territory, that is neurological construction zone reorganization. That is growth happening in real time at the cellular level. Walk through it. Your opinions are allowed to change, your identity is allowed to evolve. You are not required to keep being the person you were before life changed you. You don't have to be bitter either. You don't have to be angry. You guys, you can let all of that go. You are allowed to know what you know, you're allowed to admit what you don't and update every single time you get some new information or a new experience. That's life, you know? Pain is temporary. Transition is temporary, but who you become inside of that and who you choose to become is permanent. Victor Frankel, he chose meaning in Auschwitz, right? Instead of letting it destroy him. Edith Iger found freedom in a concentration camp. Carl Young, he mapped the shadow so we wouldn't have to walk through it blind. William Burgess gave us a language for the neutral zone so we'd know that we weren't lost and we were in transition. Every single one of them said the same thing in different words. The people who make it through are not the ones who never fall apart. They're the ones who don't abandon themselves when they do. So, guys, dangerous people are not built in comfort, they're built in confusion, pressure, loneliness, and the moments that almost broke them. They walk through it, they walk through that neutral zone, and they get to the other side. And if you are in that moment right now, I applaud you. And you know, hang in there, guys. You are still here because you truly have no idea how fucking dangerous you are or you could be. Hang on to that, okay? Thank you so much for being here and holding this part of my story with me. If today's episode resonated with you, please don't stay in silence. Share it with someone who might need to hear it. And if you're walking through your own fire right now, know this you are not too broken, you are not too late, and you are never ever alone. This has brought it down to begin again. I'm Erica, and I'll see you in the next chapter.