135 - The Gap: What Happens Between Who You Were and Who You're Becoming
This week is a little different.
Instead of interviewing a guest, Sarah shares a deeply personal reflection adapted from her newsletter. This one was called, The Gap. Inspired by her daughter's missing tooth and ever-widening empty space in her smile, Sarah explores the seasons of life when something has fallen away, but what comes next hasn't fully arrived.
Through stories of leaving a successful business, navigating parenthood, grief, identity shifts, the pandemic, and years of rebuilding, she reflects on what can be learned in the uncomfortable space between endings and beginnings.
If you're in a season of uncertainty, waiting, or wondering when the next chapter will finally emerge, this episode is an invitation to trust the process of becoming. Please pass this along to someone who could use the metaphor of “the gap.”
Episode Transcript:
Sarah Tacy: [00:00:00] Hello. Welcome to Threshold Moments. I have this really great idea. Every week, you hear me interview other people about their thresholds. Then if you get a mini-musing, it is generally me sharing nervous system tools or orientation maps to help people navigate thresholds. But then I just realized, like, oh, the only way people ever hear about my own thresholds are really through my newsletters and my blogs, which by the way, I think are really good.
Sarah Tacy: I spend weeks on these. This is my community service. I often receive emails back letting me know how they've moved people or they feel seen. Sometimes it's text messages, [00:01:00] and I'm often feeling quite vulnerable when I hit send because I think, oh, people just want tools. People just want to fix urgency or trauma.
Sarah Tacy: But the whole point of Threshold Moments, and really the point of my writing, is a sense of accompaniment. And I just had this idea, like, why don't I read my blog to you, my newsletter to you? I may start putting it up on... Ooh, what is that place that everyone is doing recently? Well, I may do that when I think of what it's called.
Sarah Tacy: Substack. Uh, people are saying it's such a beautiful place to share your long form. So for now, this piece is called The Gap. Ev- almost every newsletter I write has a photo at the beginning, and the photo is part of the story. This [00:02:00] photo is my six-year-old daughter, who is smiling as she takes a selfie, and she has a massive gap in her mouth.
Sarah Tacy: She lost one tooth, one baby tooth. She's actually lost three now, but this gap is one baby tooth that looks like three have gone missing. The gap keeps getting bigger before the tooth fills in So here's how it goes. You see this incredibly cute little girl with a really big gap, and it starts by saying, "You're getting your adult teeth," Therese said to me five years ago.
Sarah Tacy: Wait, two decades of this work studying, healing, unraveling, rebuilding, teaching teacher trainings, helping people out of chronic mental and physical pain, and you're telling [00:03:00] me in the metaphor of life I'm barely getting my adult teeth? Underneath my defenses, another part of me went, "Hmm, she might be lovingly correct."
Sarah Tacy: Because I was lying on the floor exhausted, heavy in my bones, a foggy gap between me and the next step, a gap in my life that felt so big I wasn't sure anything was coming at all. Here's the deal. I left my business I had built for seven years in New York. I loved the people I served and the very particular way I taught, teaching soulful anatomy trainings, working with professional athletes and CEOs during the 2008 crash, holding space for people in chronic pain who found freedom in their bodies and minds.
Sarah Tacy: I belonged to something [00:04:00] created by following the breadcrumbs step by step. We left New York, moved to Maine, and in the same week that Steve started his career, we also became parents. We had a role reversal in who was bringing home the paycheck, and in this case, who was now in charge of home life. Sophia didn't sleep, like really didn't sleep for years.
Sarah Tacy: I taught one class a week as opposed to my 23 a week I was teaching in New York. I was running trainings just one weekend a month, and I held a handful of major events, all while feeling like I was doing nothing compared to before. I was losing my teeth, and I didn't know it Then came losses. In 2017, a baby I never got to meet, and at the end of 2019, I very reluctantly [00:05:00] let go of what little was left of my business.
Sarah Tacy: The blessed news was that this was in preparation for a final child to come into the world. Then the pandemic. By 2020, I could barely catch my breath. Literally, I was on the floor with a baby on my chest, my back often thrown out, a four-year-old needing everything, and I was still working the night shift.
Sarah Tacy: My husband was trying to keep his company alive seven days a week. Literally seven days a week. And all child support, including school, was gone. My mind could not hold a schedule. The tooth was officially out. The gap opened and grew larger Here's the beauty that happened in the gap. The teaching and inspiration stopped showing up.
Sarah Tacy: The credentials, the trainings, the big [00:06:00] events, they fell away. The work that used to be visible disappeared. What was left was internal, small but big, humbling, an exposed version of me I learned what I absolutely would not tolerate anymore. Friendships that only took, patterns in my marriage that dimmed me, the performance of being fine, the victimhood I had collapsed into.
Sarah Tacy: I got to know my own boundaries in a way that I could no longer afford to cross. Literally no tolerance for it. I became more human, more humble, more empathetic to loss and to anyone else in a gap. I got clearer. Baby steps began, taking online training [00:07:00] sometimes while in a tub or in bed, and in 2021, a nanny saying yes.
Sarah Tacy: Then when I eventually wanted to say yes to helping a friend in deep need, it was with the skills I acquired through the gap itself. Starting to teach publicly in 2023, one gentle session at a time, getting a website together, but not ready to put my face on it yet or show any signs of joy out of fear I'd leave people behind.
Sarah Tacy: Then trying to find words for what I do now, who I am now. The adult teeth were, in fact, coming in. Damn it, Therese. I'm now watching my daughter lose her baby teeth. She actually just pulled this last one out because she decided it had been wiggling around long enough. She took a selfie of her ever-growing gap.
Sarah Tacy: She was so proud The gap is so much bigger than [00:08:00] what she lost and it's the exact right size of what's to come What's coming has actually been within her since she was in utero, tucked under the baby teeth. They wait. They let the baby teeth do the first round of eruption, then stabilizing until you forget that teething was ever a thing.
Sarah Tacy: When adult teeth come through, they're sharper, stronger, built to chew what the baby teeth couldn't. Hello, second half of life. There is right timing for things to emerge. Sometimes they come before we're ready. Sometimes they make us wait way longer than we think we can. I'm pretty sure this is the path of becoming What feels different now from then?
Sarah Tacy: I still feel quite vulnerable often, if I'm [00:09:00] honest, but I'm sturdier now, sharper. I know what's a real yes and what's a performed one. I get to keep the depth and the foundation that the nothingness and everything all at once gave me. I feel rich with the simple things This gap, the space in between, widened my foundation.
Sarah Tacy: It called in years of nervous system and trauma resolution study. I could already name every bone and muscle in the body. Now, I was learning the internal stories that bodies need to tell and the movements and support that help them release what they've been holding for years with so much effort These new practices were life-saving and joy-building.
Sarah Tacy: Bonus. The gifts from the gap stay with us. [00:10:00] If you're in a gap right now, the empty, maddening, how much longer kind, I want you to know this. The big teeth are coming. It's possible they've been waiting a lifetime. Most adults like certainty. Small steps can feel insignificant, yet it's how children's adult teeth arrive, and apparently how we do too, one tooth, one threshold at a time, each in its own way.
Sarah Tacy: Perhaps what's coming has been coming since before you took your first breath. It has its own timeline, its own desire for space and conditions to arrive. May we borrow the confidence of a kid mid-gap, certain the tooth is on its way. With deep care, Sarah. [00:11:00] P.S. If someone you love is in the gap right now, send them this.
Sarah Tacy: Sometimes the most useful thing is something or someone from the other side of the gap, like Therese was for me
Sarah Tacy: I hope you enjoyed. If you wanna get on my newsletter, you can go to my website, sarahtacey dot com, and either join via twenty one days of untapped support, which is free or just hit join newsletter. And if you want to go back and read any of the other blog posts that I've written those are also on my website Thank you so much for tuning in it's such a pleasure.