I gave two leaves a photo shoot.
They were lying on my desk in that brief, beautiful stage between green and yellow, neither color willing to give way completely to the other. I held them against different backgrounds, moved them toward the window, and turned them over in my hand to catch the light.
Apparently, this is who I am now. Or, if I’m honest, who I’ve always been.
By later that afternoon, they were brown.
The color had dulled, the edges curled, and the soft leaves from my morning walk had dried enough to crack between my fingers.
I kept them on my desk anyway. Maybe because they weren’t finished with me yet.
A day or two before I found them, a few yellow leaves had caught my attention on the same walking route.
Almost everything around them was still green. No sweep of fall color across the hillside, no tree turning all at once. Just a handful tucked among hundreds of green scrub oak leaves, already well into their turn.
The next day, I looked for them again. Their yellow had deepened, and yet they remained surrounded by green.
There was something almost defiant about it, although assigning courage to shrubbery may be one of the occupational hazards of spending too much time thinking while I walk.
Those leaves were still changing when the two on my desk had already turned brown.
* * *
In the last few years, I’ve built a business and taken a certain amount of pride in how much of it I could figure out myself. I coded my website, workshopped my messaging, created marketing materials and social content, and built automations for things I barely knew existed before I decided I needed them.
Give me a problem, enough time, and access to a search engine, and I become dangerously optimistic about what I can accomplish.
The competence itself was never the issue. I liked understanding how things worked and knowing I didn’t have to wait for someone else. And, if I’m honest, doing things myself gave me something else I valued just as much: control of the vision.
I’ve sought advice from experts in marketing, sales, messaging, business models, and growth. Some of their guidance changed my work for the better. Other recommendations made perfect business sense and felt completely wrong for the business I wanted to build.
Someone can know exactly how to increase revenue and still know very little about the life I want that revenue to support.
That matters because I already know what can happen when meaningful work becomes the thing everything else starts orbiting.
Earlier in my corporate career, I genuinely enjoyed my work. Complicated problems energized me. Learning came easily when I cared about the work and the people it served. Being useful gave me tremendous satisfaction.
Work didn’t have to be terrible to cost me something.
That was part of what made the cost difficult to see. I immersed myself in ideas that engaged me, rewarded me, and supplied plenty of reasons to keep saying yes. Meanwhile, health, relationships, and quieter parts of myself became easier to postpone.
When I began building my business, I did not want to recreate that life with myself as the boss. I wanted the business to belong inside my life, not require my life to bend around it.
More control should have made that easier. In many ways, it did.
But old patterns are surprisingly portable.
I could still disappear into a problem for hours simply because I knew I could solve it. One task led to another system, another improvement, another thing I could surely figure out myself, all while I told myself this was different because I had chosen the work.
Asking someone else into the process carried its own risks.
They might not understand what I was trying to build. They might see something I did not want to see. Or they might be persuasive enough that I stopped hearing myself clearly.
Writing taught me a different way to think about that.
When I first began sharing unfinished drafts, I found the experience more vulnerable than I expected. A finished piece could at least pretend to defend itself. A draft was still becoming.
Good readers often saw what I couldn’t. They noticed where I had rushed, explained too much, or left too much of an idea inside my own head. Their suggestions, however, did not always belong in the work.
Sometimes a comment illuminated exactly what the piece needed. Other times I felt almost immediately that following the advice would pull the writing away from what I meant to say.
Learning to tell the difference stretched me before it changed me.
The useful feedback strengthened the draft. The advice I chose not to use strengthened my discernment.
Over time, allowing other people to challenge my writing did not weaken my sense of authorship. It clarified it.
I began to wonder why I had treated business so differently.
Somewhere along the way, I can figure this out had become tangled with I should figure this out.
Self-trust had picked up an additional requirement I don’t remember choosing: if I truly trusted myself, perhaps I shouldn’t need much from anyone else.
The leaves on my desk complicated that assumption.
They had lost nearly all the art-worthy color that first made me pick them up. Yet the leaves still attached to the branches continued to change. Their yellow deepened into gold. A few nearby leaves had finally begun their own turn.
The first leaves had not waited for the rest of the tree.
But they had remained part of it.
I have spent years learning not to hand other people authority over what I know about myself. I don’t want to unlearn that. Writing taught me, though, that inviting another perspective and surrendering authorship are not the same thing. Other eyes can reveal something I have missed without becoming the eyes through which I see everything.
The distinction reached farther than my writing.
My faith has always included the belief that the Divine lives within us, that we carry wisdom and gifts we are meant to recognize rather than endlessly seek outside ourselves. I had mistaken that inner wisdom for a mandate to be self-sufficient.
Instead, self-trust means knowing what is mine while remaining connected to what nourishes it.
When I walked past those first leaves again, their yellow was unmistakable against all that green.
They were becoming something different without becoming disconnected.
