A Letter on Trusting Timing
Growth rarely unfolds in a straight line. Trusting timing is the discipline of continuing your work without attaching your worth to the outcome.
Dear Dancer,
For much of my career, I felt behind.
I graduated from college just as a major recession began. The industry tightened. Opportunities narrowed. There was a constant sense that I had missed the window or arrived at the wrong moment.
Even in the years that followed, when I didn’t book something I deeply wanted, it felt like further confirmation that I was late to my own life.
But time has a way of clarifying what urgency distorts.
Every role I did not book, every opportunity that passed, eventually made sense in hindsight. Not because rejection felt good, but because I could see how misaligned certain paths would have been.
The most pivotal turning point was my leave of absence.
At the time, it felt like everything was falling apart. I often describe that period as holding onto the outside of a moving train — gripping tightly, being pulled forward, but never truly inside it. I was building extraordinary highlights for the people around me — collaborators, companies, even my partner at the time. Their trajectories were accelerating. Their dreams were unfolding.
From the outside, it was exciting.
Internally, I was exhausted.
What I came to understand was this: I had been participating in many beautiful visions, but I was avoiding my own.
The leave of absence was not a pause out of weakness. It was a necessary dismantling. A quiet and often uncomfortable investigation into the question: What do I actually want?
Not what is impressive.
Not what is available.
Not what keeps me adjacent to momentum.
But what is mine?
Over time, that inquiry brought me back inside my own train — inside my own body, my own desires, my own giftings. What initially felt like falling behind revealed itself to be a realignment.
Looking back now, I no longer see those years as delay.
I see them as preparation.
I would tell my twenty-two-year-old self this:
The first fifteen years of your adult life will challenge you privately in ways no one sees. Things will fall apart. Plans will shift. Identities will dissolve. But that unraveling is not the end of your path — it is the forging of it.
When you learn to stand fully inside yourself, the life you build will not be borrowed. It will be yours.
Trusting timing is not passive.
It does not mean you stop training.
It does not mean you lower your standards.
It does not mean you stop wanting.
It means you continue your work without panic. You allow space for redirection. You release comparison as a measure of worth.
An artist’s path is rarely linear.
But it can be coherent.
When you are aligned with yourself, even detours become directional.
With steadiness,
Sarah
Integration
Reflect on a moment that felt like rejection or delay.
Ask yourself: What did that experience protect me from? What did it prepare me for?
Identify one desire that feels truly yours — separate from external validation.
If the answers feel unclear, that is often a sign that deeper self-inquiry is needed. Clarity of direction develops through honest reflection and, at times, guided conversation.
Trusting timing is less about waiting.
It is about aligning.