Not long ago, I was on a call with three women I’ve been working with. I said one word, trapeze, and all three went quiet.

Not because it was dramatic. Because it was exactly right.

One platform. One bar in your hand. The next platform has its own bar, waiting. To get from the first to the second, you have to let go before your hand ever touches the new one.

There’s a stretch of air in between where you’re holding nothing. No safety net you can see. No guarantee your hand finds the new bar on the first try.

Every performer goes through it. It’s not the mistake. It’s the move.

On that call, not one of the three women had a full grip yet. Some still had a hand on the old bar, the version of themselves that used to work, even if it doesn’t fit anymore. Some had just touched the new one and hadn’t trusted it with their full weight yet.

Nobody was behind. The trapeze puts everyone through that same gap, for exactly as long as it takes.

I didn’t say this part on the call. I was still finding the words myself.

I know that space a different way than they do. They’re choosing to let go. I didn’t get to choose.

I built three birth centers from nothing. Eighteen years of catching babies, holding women through the most vulnerable hours of their lives, building something I thought I’d run until I was old enough to hand it to someone else.

Then, in my fifties, the floor fell out. I didn’t let go of that bar. It was pulled out of my hand while I was still holding on with everything I had.

There was one specific day. I sat down with my partner and said the words out loud: we have to close. Not a conversation about whether. A conversation about how. Eighteen years of catching people, and no one there to catch me.

There was no next bar in sight. Just the air. Savings gone. A day job to cover what the business used to cover. Every certainty I’d built, gone in the same season.

I want to tell you the middle part was graceful. It wasn’t. Some days it still isn’t.

That empty-handed stretch is where the real work happens. You cannot reach for a bar that isn’t there yet while your other hand is still full of what you lost. Both hands have to be empty before either one is free.

If you’re in that middle right now, whatever put you there, chosen or not, I made something for exactly this part. A ten-minute guided audio. Just space to sit with what’s actually shifting.

Listen here

You don’t have to land first. Just start listening for the next bar.