It’s Time to Try (Defying Gravity)
On the moment you can’t go back to not knowing, and the courage to try before you have all the answers.
There’s a song that’s stayed with me for a long time.
I first heard it freshman year of college, just after I’d moved onto campus. One afternoon, I was coming back to the dorms when I heard this soaring, theatrical music blasting from one of the rooms. I poked my head in and found my classmate, someone I wouldn’t have pegged as a musical theater enthusiast, belting out the lyrics to a Broadway cast recording, door open, completely unselfconscious.
A little stunned, I asked what it was.
“You haven’t heard of Wicked?” he said, incredulous. “You have to check out Defying Gravity. It’ll blow you away.”
And it did, mostly in the way good music hits you when you’re eighteen. It was catchy. Big. Uplifting. It resonated, but I didn’t yet have the lived experience for it to really take hold.
Then, years passed. A career unfolded. Responsibilities accumulated. And somewhere along the way, the song started returning, this time with weight. Not because of nostalgia or spectacle, but because of the specific threshold it names so cleanly: the moment you realize something inside you has shifted, and there’s no way to go back to not knowing it.
“Something has changed within me. Something is not the same.”
Early in the song, there’s an argument between Glinda and Elphaba that I’ve come to hear as a clash between two selves that can no longer peacefully coexist.
Glinda speaks for the part of us that believes in the bargain: keep your head down, strive, earn approval, and eventually you’ll arrive. You’ll have everything you always wanted. That voice isn’t foolish or shallow; it’s protective. If the bargain no longer holds, what does that say about all the effort, compromise, and sacrifice you poured into it?
Elphaba speaks from the moment of awakening. The point at which she realizes that what she thought she wanted now requires her to shrink, to look away, to betray something she knows to be true. And her most honest line isn’t defiant, it’s grief-tinged clarity:
“But I don’t want it. No, I can’t want it anymore.”
That’s the friction many high performers recognize. It’s not that the titles, money, or prestige have lost their allure. They often still hold real appeal. But once you’re awake to the quiet distortion — in your pace, your work, or the version of success you’ve been inhabiting — you can’t unknow it. You might keep going, but you’re no longer unaware of the other self that’s present.
Awareness, unfortunately, doesn’t arrive with instructions. There’s no clean reset button, no obvious next step. Just the growing sense that continuing as-is will slowly erode something essential. This is where capable, conscientious people often find themselves. Not because they lack courage, but because they’ve built lives worth protecting: mortgages, reputations, people who depend on their steadiness. You don’t want to run away from your life; you want to move toward a version of it that feels worth inhabiting.
I lived in that in-between space for years. Anyone close to me knew that something felt off in my relationship with work. I could name pieces of it: wanting more meaning, not recognizing myself in the people one rung up the ladder, feeling like I was trading what mattered for titles and money.
And yet, I stayed.
It was never as simple as “just leave.” I didn’t want to run away from something; I wanted to move toward something that mattered. That was incredibly hard. I often felt stuck, caught between a system that no longer fit and a future that hadn’t fully taken shape.
Without a map for that terrain, it can feel safer to keep the deeper questions at arm’s length. To numb them. To tell yourself you’ll deal with them later.
But there is a cost to staying aligned with a story that has become a costume, usually paid quietly, over time in drained energy, resentment, and a slow erosion of self-trust. We tend to fixate on the risks of change while ignoring the compound interest of remaining in a life that no longer fits. There is no cost-free option.
So, what is one to do? We often hear “close your eyes and leap” as a call to blind risk. And that’s where many people recoil, including myself.
But Defying Gravity points to a different posture.
It’s time to try. Not decide. Try.
“I think I’ll try defying gravity.” That framing matters. Trying isn’t a leap into the void; it’s more experimental. It suggests you don’t have to torch your current world to take yourself seriously. Trying looks like paying closer attention and trusting your intuition. Following energy instead of numbing it. Making small, informed moves toward what feels more alive, even when the outcomes aren’t guaranteed.
In this light, defying gravity isn’t about escaping constraints. It’s about discovering which constraints are real, and which ones are simply inherited scripts, passed down by people whose lives you don’t actually want to live. Closing your eyes doesn’t mean abandoning discernment; it means closing them to the distraction of should.
To the borrowed definitions of success, insisting that the only way to achieve a good, respectable life is through self-sacrifice, assimilation, and quieting your inner voice/sense of direction.
And the leap isn’t necessarily into a new job or a dramatic exit. Sometimes the leap is quieter (and harder). It’s the decision not to leave yourself behind. It’s choosing to stand in your own authority right where you are, even when there are no good examples of what that’s supposed to look like.
In my own life, I was fiercely protective of that inner knowing. The sense that something more true was asking to be lived. I kept asking questions. I kept reflecting, experimenting, and staying in touch with what felt true, even when there was no clear roadmap showing me the way. I tried to show up more fully, testing what alignment could look like from the inside, even when the structure itself offered few examples.
Sometimes that stance felt rewarding. Sometimes it was deeply frustrating, especially when I bumped up against the limits of what was possible inside a large organization.
But what I learned, slowly, was this: the courage wasn’t in the eventual departure. It was in the daily refusal to abandon my own authority while I was still there. That winding path — the uncertainty, the “not yet”, the trying — became the very thing that now allows me to stand beside others in similar terrain.
If this song has been haunting you, it’s probably because you’re living somewhere inside that try. You’re learning to trust your instincts. To trust your direction. To believe you’re not wrong for seeing what you see, even if the next step is still obscured.
The next step isn’t always a leap. Sometimes it’s the quieter work of staying in contact with the questions, without numbing them, rushing them, or forcing answers that aren’t ready yet.
That kind of listening is already an act of courage. You don’t have to figure it all out at once, and you don’t have to do it alone.
If you’re somewhere in the try, you’re in good company. New reflections about once a month. Sign up below.