This week, I became a podcaster.
Even typing those words feels a little strange.
A few months ago, if someone had suggested I’d be recording podcast episodes and uploading them to Spotify, I probably would have laughed and changed the subject. Yet somehow, after several people asked whether I had ever considered a podcast, curiosity finally got the better of me.
How hard could it be?
Record a short audio.
Upload it.
Share it.
Done.
At least, that was the plan.
What actually happened looked a little different.
There was the overthinking first.
What should I call it?
What category should it go in?
What artwork should I use?
Would anyone listen?
Would I sound ridiculous?
Then came the technology.
The recording itself went surprisingly well. Years ago, I took Speech and Debate and spent time speaking in front of groups, so talking into a microphone wasn’t nearly as intimidating as I expected.
Uploading it, however, was another story.
My phone and Spotify seemed determined not to cooperate.
Files wouldn’t go where I wanted them to go.
Settings had to be changed.
Permissions needed updating.
At one point, I had the same audio file saved in multiple places and still couldn’t figure out how to get it where it needed to be.
Then my phone stopped making calls.
Not exactly the outcome I was hoping for.
Somewhere in the process of trying to fix that problem, I accidentally entered a part of my phone I never knew existed. Suddenly, I was staring at a screen filled with strange codes, serial numbers, and an Android robot lying on its back looking like it was in the middle of surgery.
I had no idea what I had done.
For a brief moment, I was convinced I had permanently broken my phone.
Thankfully, I hadn’t.
Eventually, the phone was rescued.
The podcast was uploaded.
The trailer was recorded.
The calls started working again.
And somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, God quietly reminded me of something.
For years, I thought growth was supposed to look cleaner than this.
I thought becoming looked organized.
Planned.
Predictable.
I assumed confident people took big steps because they already knew what they were doing.
But maybe that’s not how it works at all.
Maybe confidence grows after we take the step.
Maybe courage is simply deciding the possibility of growth is greater than the fear of looking foolish.
Maybe becoming is far messier than we expected.
The older I get, the more I realize that many of the things I once avoided weren’t impossible. They were simply unfamiliar.
I wasn’t afraid because I couldn’t do them.
I was afraid because I hadn’t done them yet.
There is a difference.
This season of life feels different than previous seasons.
For so many years, I carried an invisible pressure to get everything right. To perform. To achieve. To meet standards that no human being could consistently meet.
And honestly?
It was exhausting.
Lately, I’ve been learning to loosen my grip on perfection.
To laugh more.
To criticize myself less.
To allow room for mistakes, detours, and learning curves.
And the freedom that comes with that is hard to describe.
It feels a little like walking barefoot through cool meadow grass while a gentle breeze moves through the trees.
There is space to breathe again.
Space to enjoy the journey instead of constantly evaluating my performance along the way.
This week reminded me that growth rarely arrives wrapped in perfection.
Sometimes it arrives disguised as confusion, technical difficulties, wrong turns, and moments where you’re convinced you’ve broken something important.
But if you stay with the process, you often discover that what felt like failure was actually growth in progress.
The podcast exists.
The phone works.
The world didn’t end.
And perhaps most importantly, I had fun.
Maybe that’s the lesson.
Sometimes becoming doesn’t look like a butterfly gracefully emerging from a cocoon.
Sometimes it looks like an overwhelmed caterpillar accidentally pushing the wrong button and ending up somewhere completely unexpected.
Either way, growth is still happening.
And that, my friend, is a beautiful thing.
