When Growth Feels Impossible

This past fall, growth felt impossible to me because I didn’t have the space to conceive of it.

At the time, I was working remotely and driving my daughter to daycare every day. Her daycare was thirty minutes away. That meant thirty minutes to drop her off, thirty minutes to drive back home, and then the same thing again in the afternoon. On a good day, that was two hours in the car. On a bad day, with traffic, it was more.

By the time my workday started, I had already burned through a huge portion of my energy just getting us where we needed to be. By the time the day ended, I was depleted. There was no space left to think about growth. Maintaining was taking up all the room.

When people talk about growth, they often assume you have the luxury of time to use your imagination. But imagination requires space. When your days are packed wall to wall with logistics, responsibility, and exhaustion, there is no room to dream about what could be different. There is only getting through the day.

Everything shifted when I moved my daughter to a daycare three minutes away.

My daily commute went from two hours to twenty minutes. And the difference was astronomical. I had space to breathe. I had space to think. I had space to imagine. And I had space to see, clearly, just how uncomfortable my life was.

It wasn’t that I suddenly realized I was unhappy. I already knew that. What changed was that I finally had the mental and emotional space to consider solutions. I wasn’t buried in the thick of surviving every single day. I could ask a new question: How do I get out of this cycle?

When growth feels impossible, it’s often not because you don’t know what to do. It’s because you don’t have the capacity to even imagine something different yet. Growth doesn’t always begin with vision. Sometimes it begins with creating enough space to see that change is necessary.

In Thursday’s post, I use quantum tunneling, a concept from physics, as a metaphor for how small, steady changes can create movement even when a situation feels completely blocked.