The Perspective Shift at 80ft

Yesterday I climbed an 80-foot tower in the middle of a state park with my family.

I’m scared of heights. And to do the family bonding… I didn’t look out once on the way up.

Head down. Next rung. Just get through it. When I would glance over to the side I would lose my stomach. That’s a pattern I know well. I have a million stories and an entire identity about being afraid of heights too.

Which brings me back to the tower.

I got to the top and my stomach was still flipping. But I looked out anyway.

The park stretched further than I could have imagined from the ground. The canopy I’d been walking through was just the surface of something enormous. I could see where it opened, where it thickened, where the water moved through it.

I love me some metaphors so of course one popped in my head immediately. I couldn’t have seen any of that with my eyes fixed on the next rung.

That’s what stops when you finally put down the doing — not the fear, but the tunnel vision. The view doesn’t require the fear to be gone. It just requires you to look up.

And here’s the thing — it still took me most of a day at this campground to actually arrive. To stop scanning and relax. To put down the doing and just be in the trees with the people I love. That’s how deep a pattern runs. The environment changed. My nervous system hadn’t gotten the memo yet.

And I noticed it in real time. My family was relaxed, phones down, completely at ease. And I couldn’t settle. I kept moving, kept adjusting, kept finding the next small thing to do or think about. Not because anything needed doing. Because my body didn’t know how to be still.

It took hours. Actual hours. To take myself off doing mode in the middle of nature, surrounded by people I love, with nowhere to be.

That’s not a personality quirk. That’s a nervous system that has been running on high alert for so long it forgot there was a floor.

And that’s when it hit me. Almost a year ago I wrote my very first post here about the gap between doing and being. The Strategist who reaches for the calendar before the dust settles. The Truth-Teller who knows the deeper work is in the feeling, not the fixing.

I thought I had been writing about a season of change.

Turns out I had been writing about something older than that. And I’m still in it.

That’s when I reached for my Kindle. One of the three books I have going right now is Dr. Ingrid Clayton’s Fawning — my best friend recommended it and I’ve been going back and forth between no way and this is exactly right ever since I started it. Opening to Chapter Three in the middle of a campground, unable to settle, finally named a possibility I hadn’t been willing to sit with.

She writes about why fawning is so hard to recognize in high performers: “This is the genius of fawning. When it’s working, it feels powerful. We can feel capable, smart, flexible, generous, empathic, kind... No wonder fawners don’t always resonate with language that can feel steeped in shame and weakness. We are freaking acrobats.”

She goes on: fawners often look perfectly fine. High-functioning. Successful careers, long-term relationships. Managing well. The truth underneath is that we’ve accommodated so much for so long, we don’t even feel new trespasses anymore.

That’s the part that got me curious. Not the dysfunction — the disguise. Because it doesn’t feel like survival when you’re in it. It feels like competence. It feels like being good at your life.

That’s not ambition. That’s a nervous system that learned doing equals safe — and got really, really good at it.

For a long time I told myself that was just being a good employee or a good mother. Staying ahead of what everyone needed. Anticipating. Providing. Being the one who holds it together so everyone else can relax.

But my kids are self-sufficient now. They don’t need me to do for them anymore. And somewhere in this weekend I realized — I STILL don’t actually know how to just be yet. To sit in the same space and let them be who they’ve become without managing anything. That’s a different kind of presence. And it requires the same thing everything else in this pattern requires: putting down the doing long enough to actually show up.

Oops. I didn’t pass that test with one Substack and six weeks alone in Texas. So of course that it comes up now when I just picked up the substack thinking again.

Here’s what I’ve learned about the patterns we carry: they don’t stay in one lane. The same thing showing up in your body, your relationships, and your career at the same time isn’t a coincidence. It’s a signal. Your life is trying to teach you something and it will keep finding new rooms to teach it in until you actually learn it.

The tower. The campground. My kids. My job.

Same pattern. Different rooms.

I’ve been the swiss army knife in all of them — capable, delivering, holding it together. And in all of them, the moment of real shift came not from doing more but from stopping long enough to see the whole landscape.

So what makes this moment different from a year ago.

When I wrote my first post I was standing in the gap between what had just changed and what came next. I thought if I could just get through the transition I’d land somewhere stable.

I didn’t account for the possibility that the transition was the destination.

I tried to move to Texas. I did everything right. And I’m back in Florida anyway — same lesson, same choice, same invitation to let go of the outcome.

And now I’m sitting with something harder. My professional chapter has an end date I didn’t choose. The move didn’t execute the way it needed to. No amount of overfunctioning, planning, or delivering beyond expectations changes that.

The Strategist has run every scenario. There is no calendar that solves this one.

The pattern that kept me safe for decades — the one that felt like competence, like being good at my life — is the same one that can’t get me where I’m going next.

And somehow — sitting in a hammock in the middle of the woods, stomach still flipping, reading a book about why I can’t stop doing — I felt something release.

Not resolution. Not a plan. Just the recognition that I’ve been doing this letting go of doing for over a year and maybe there isn’t a destination but just a choosing in each present moment.

I’m not still learning the difference. I’m still becoming it.

That’s the gap between knowing and integration. You can understand something completely and still not be living it yet. The knowing comes first. The becoming takes longer. And the unlearning — that happens 80 feet up, stomach still flipping, in the middle of the woods on a Sunday morning.

It’s still the work.

What do you already know that you haven’t become yet?