EP118 Your Sh*tstorm Has a Purpose: Why Your Hardest Moments Are the Exact Ones That Change You

If life currently feels something like emotional Jenga… as in, one wrong move might send the whole bloody tower crashing down… this episode is going to land in the best possible way.

Because today we’re talking about polarity…. the universal law that explains why your darkest, messiest, most “are you actually kidding me?” moments aren’t the sign you’ve screwed up. They’re the sign something so f*cking powerful is being rearranged.

This isn’t an episode about “positive vibes only”

It’s about truth.

It’s about the reality that every glow-up you’ve ever had… started with a sh*tstorm you didn’t ask for.

Inside this episode, we go deep into:

• why your brain defaults to disaster mode even when you’re technically safe
  
  
• the real reason life rips things out of your hands when you won’t let go
  
  
• how contrast creates identity (and why you NEED the lows to experience real highs)
  
  
• what stoicism gets right about pain, growth and reinvention
  
  
• how to find meaning in the middle of chaos, not six months later
  
  
• the subtle shift that turns a breakdown into a breakthrough
  
  
• why endings are never punishment…. they’re preparation
  
  

This one is raw, relatable and basically a warm hug with a side of “get up love, you’re not done yet.”

If you’ve ever thought:

“Why does everything hit at once?”

Or

“I swear the universe is taking the p*ss…”

…this episode will change the way you see your entire story.

Because you’re not failing.

You’re not cursed.

You’re not behind.

You’re in the polarity… the contrast that builds the woman you’re becoming.

And when you understand that? 

Everything shifts.

Your meaning shifts.

Your power shifts.

You shift.

Grab your brew (or wine), get comfy, and let’s walk through the sh*tstorm you’re in… and find the purpose waiting inside it.

Love

Sarah x

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Transcript

Sarah Elizabeth  00:00

Hello, beauts, and welcome to the reinvention era podcast with me, Sarah Elizabeth. And if you're in the UK, you'll know how chuffing freezing it's been the last couple of weeks. And I know us Brits always like to talk about the weather but you know, like, literally one minute you could still be in your Havaianas. Well, actually, ordinarily, I would have been, but given said flip flops caused me a broken arm back in June that's still bloody broken. I'll rephrase that, one minute you could still be in a T shirt the next fucking three layers of thermals and a duvet coat. Still don't quite defrost the icicles forming on your nips. And everyone who a few months ago was moaning about the heat, is now moaning about the cold, dark nights, you know it right, which kind of sums up what we're talking about today. Now imagine this for a minute. You're standing on a beach, maybe Brighton, maybe Blackpool, who knows, but it's absolutely freezing. The wind is slapping you in the face. The sea looks like it wants to freaking bite you, and you're thinking, Why the hell did I think this was a good idea to come to the beach, but then then the sun breaks through for two glorious minutes, just two, that's it, and suddenly the water looks beautiful, beautiful, gorgeous. The stones or sand or whatever start to warm up a bit on your feet. Oh, nice people start smiling like they weren't just cursing the fucking universe 10 minutes ago, same beach, same sea, same scene, just a completely different light and that my love is polarity, because we tend to think life is either good or bad, light or dark, utter Shit or magical. But it's actually the contrast that gives everything meaning. You don't notice warmth until you've been absolutely freezing. You don't feel joy the same way until you've been cracked wide fucking open. You don't understand love until you've survived heartbreak. And polarity is not punishment, it's perspective. It's the universe going look again. There's more to see here than you think. And so today, we're going all in on that polarity, the duality of it, why we automatically jump to the negative, why your brain immediately assumes the worst, why duality is actually a feature, not some kind of Jinx. Plus, how the absolute darkest moments of your life can end up being the exact thing that shifts you into your next chapter, into your next era. So if you're currently sitting in the middle of a shitshow wondering what the the point of it all is today. We're talking about the law of polarity, or, as I like to call it, the universal reminder that life is a fucking contrast. You can't have up without down. You can't have light without dark. You can't have hot without cold, love without loss, joy without pain. And it's not punishment, like I say, it's balance. It's what gives everything meaning. And honestly, once you start looking at life through this lens, you'll never see your so called bad seasons quite the same way again. 

Sarah Elizabeth  04:48

So truth about opposites, we all love the good stuff, don't we? Great stuff, the light, the joy, the clarity, the certainty. But in reality, none of those things would exist without their opposite. If everything was light all the time, you'd be fucking blinded, wouldn't you? If everything was easy, you'd never grow everything was stable, you'd get bored. Hey, freaking mind and polarity. Isn't the universe torturing you, it's the universe educating you. Think about it. Really. Think about it. You only appreciate calm because you've known chaos, right? You only know love because you felt heartbreak. You only know who you are now because at some point you completely blinking, lost yourself. So much of reinvention comes from that duality, that moment where the roller coaster of life flips you upside down and round about and round and round about, and it goes, I know you didn't quite sign up for this bit, but this is how you meet the next version of you, buttes. So why do we jump straight to the negative? Well, basically because the human brain is wired to scan for danger. Its job is to keep us alive. That's it's job, and it's like this evolutionary hangover. We're still running the same survival software that used to keep us from being eaten by random tigers and lions chasing us. So when something goes wrong, the breakup, the redundancy, the diagnosis, the unexpected plot twist, your brain immediately starts screaming, we're doomed, we'rer screwed, abandon ship, abandon ship, bitches, it doesn't shout. Oh How interesting. It's an opportunity for expansion and learning how jolly exciting. It goes straight to complete catastrophe, because your brain's job is to keep you alive, not to keep you happy. 

Sarah Elizabeth  07:32

But let's just call it out because, well, just because your brain calls out something bad doesn't mean it actually is. Every negative carries a seed of something new. Every ending contains a beginning. Every failure is data. The stoics knew this. Marcus Aurelius said, what stands in the way becomes the way. The obstacle is the path. You can't skip the dark bit, but you can decide not to fucking drown in it. So let's get real life for a second, because I know this might be hard to hear right now, especially if you are in the middle of the shitstorm. Because let's face it, some of it is super damn hard divorce, for example, divorce is one of the biggest fucking polarities there is. On the one end, you've got loss and grief and fear and rejection. But on the other you've got freedom, truth, identity, rebirth. It's both devastation and deliverance, you lose the illusion for sure, for sure you do, but you're going yourself, and you can't appreciate the peace of that until you've lived through the noise. You can't value the independence until you've experienced that entanglement. Remember that first lockdown in the panny D like the weirdest global paradox ever, ever, we fucking hated it off, didn't we all that isolation, all that restriction, all the fear, but, but, but, but it also gave us space, clarity and permission to stop performing for a bit and just chill out. We were forced to sit with ourselves. And half of us came out of it going, actually, I don't want to go back to how things were, and that's not toxic positivity. Sometimes it turns out to be the wake up call we might need, like losing a job, getting made redundant, feels like such a failure, didn't it? But ask anyone who's ever been pushed out of a job that they'd actually outgrown, and they'll tell you that was the moment that everything started. We don't move when we're comfortable, we move when we're shoved off a fucking cliff. Polarity again. The shove hurts, but it's what wakes you up. 

Sarah Elizabeth  10:50

Talking of shove. I just want to read you a section from a recently published book by Jaxon Feeley. Hang on. Hang on. It's called fear proof, right? Jaxon Feeley, and it's in the first chapter, part one of the unravelling for everyone terrified of making a change, but that you know, might be needed, but it's a bit scary. Just listen to this, right? This? I had to read this several times, right? Oh, hang on. Where are we the edge? It's like standing barefoot at the very edge of the top of a cliff in the middle of a storm. The wind doesn't just blow it bites. It whips up the kind of cold that gets into your bones and makes your teeth ache. The salt in the air floods your mouth and nose. The sea below, hidden beneath a blanket of low cloud, crashes against the rocks in a relentless, urgent rhythm that thuds like a warning your toes grip the rough, wet stone behind is the life you know, familiar, structured, perhaps successful by other people's standards, Instagram worthy. Perhaps there's safety there, but deep down, something aches you've outgrown it, or it's outgrown you. You feel the urge to leap ahead of you is a vast, terrifying unknown. You can't see what's beneath the clouds. You don't know how far the fall is or what's waiting if you jump, it's a chasm of uncertainty we all fear. You don't even know if your landing place will be better than where you are right now, teetering on this cliff, all you know is that something inside you whispers there's more than this. When your gut keeps whispering that there's more. It's not lying. The truth is relentless like that. It keeps knocking until you open the door. Your leap doesn't come out of nowhere. It builds quietly through your discomfort and the resentment you're too polite to voice. First, you tell yourself you're just tired. You call it a bad week, a bad month, then you avoid certain people because you can't fake the smile anymore. Your playlist change, your sleep changes. You stop making plans. But the knot in your stomach doesn't loosen. It tightens one day. The weight of pretending is heavier than the fear of letting it all go. Pause for a second. Think about the last time you felt that quiet pull, not the obvious kind, the one no one else saw. The details matter. Where were you? What could you hear? Your body remembers, even if your mind tries to forget. Did you feel it in your stomach, your chest, or somewhere else entirely? Keep that moment of feeling the pull in your mind. Maybe for you, the edge isn't a cliff at all. Maybe it's a very literal situation sitting in your car outside work knowing you can't face another meeting. Maybe it's lying in bed next to someone you no longer recognise. Maybe it's staring at your bank statement, realising you've put a life you can't afford, not just financially, but emotionally, whatever your edge looks like, you'll know by the knot in your stomach and the quiet thought you can't unhear. You already know what it is, don't you that one thing you've been avoiding, excusing or dressing up as something else, and that whisper that's what starts to shake your world, even when you when you thought you'd built the life you'd always wanted. Standing on the edge, your heart beats louder than your thoughts and a lump you can't swallow down forms in your throat 1000 what ifs pull at your ankles all at once. Peering over the edge brings the guilt of wanting more than the life others would be grateful for. And worst of all is the fear that if you jump, you might never come back. It's not thrilling, it's not romantic, it's not a Netflix montage with uplifting music. It's paralysing your mind tells you to step back, at least back there you. You know the rules. It says. You know what to expect. You know how to be liked, you know the world accepts this version of you, even if it doesn't feel like you anymore. It's safe, it's comfortable, it carries no risk. So the question becomes, why on earth would anyone choose to leap why would they walk away from certainty, security and comfort? For one simple reason, staying where they are means killing their soul. I've come to realise that every time my mind says, Stay where you are, don't do that scary thing, why would you leave the job you're good at? That's my body screaming at me to move, and I must be willing to accept that I will feel extremely uncomfortable while I do it. I must do it. Scared, fear, proof. Jaxon Feeley, how freaking emotional does that make you feel? 

Sarah Elizabeth  15:56

If there's something that you have outgrown, I know or know you'll feel this inside that energy is moving through you, just like it did for me when I read that energy in motion, e motion, and every motion lives on a continuum A scale, love and hate, confidence and fear, excitement and anxiety. They're not opposites. They're neighbours, different ends of the same street. You only hate someone that you once loved, right? Which, yeah, can make us feel icky as fuck if we think of the ex, but it's true, in it, just like you only fear things that really matter to you, it's only scary on the edge of the cliff because it fucking matters. You only get anxious about stuff you care about doing well, so when you feel something big and messy, actually, that's not weakness, that's aliveness. The goal isn't to stop feeling negative emotions. The goal is to understand that feeling them is what gives the positive ones some texture, some reality. You can't selectively numb. Believe me, I've learned that the fucking hard way. If you numb the pain, you numb the joy and all. So instead of lighting the lows, you start biting them, knowing they're the same wave that brings you back to the highs. It's kind of a stoic kind of way through the shit. But stoicism isn't about suppressing emotions. It's about mastering perception. When something goes wrong, the stoic doesn't go, This shouldn't have happened. I go, okay, it happened. Well, what can I do with it? And that's the shift from victim to Creator. The stoics call it love of fate, not resignation, but acceptance. Radical acceptance is the art of looking at your life and going, I don't love everything that's happened, but I can love what it taught me turn the shit show from it happening to you to it happening for you, and reinvention meets stoicism looks something like I cried, I swore a lot. I lay on the floor for a bit, a lot, and then I got up and built something better. And it's not either or, it's and you can honour the hurt and still extract the lesson. You don't have to sugarcoat pain. Just don't give it the bite. Don't give it the stage. It doesn't need to stay centre stage unless you let it. And there's this polarity when it comes to identity, too. Every version of you exists because of contrast. Every single one the you that's confident today. She was built by the version of you who doubted everything, the woman who sets boundaries. Now she's here because an older version of you didn't we learn by polarity. We grow by opposition. You needed the heartbreak to know how deeply you could love. You needed the burnout to realise that rest is fucking needed. It's sacred. Actually, you needed the chaos to cry.

Sarah Elizabeth  19:59

Crave the calm. Identity is not static. It's sculpted and reshaped by every contrast you've survived. And that's what reinvention is, the moment you stop seeing your story as a list of things that went wrong and start seeing it as the raw material of who you're becoming, and I know you're still trying to resist that only we just resist contrast because it's uncomfortable. We want the light without the shadow, the wind, without the risk, the love without the vulnerability, but duality means you can't separate them. If you want joy, you've got to risk grief. If you want connection, you've got to risk rejection. If you want freedom, you've got to release control. It's the trade off that makes it real. If everything was one tone, one temperature, one emotion, life be flatlined and fucking boring. Polarity gives life its shape. It's what makes you feel depth and beauty and meaning. Even nature works this way. The tides go in and out. The seasons change. Night follows day. The sun doesn't apologise for setting. It knows it's gonna freaking rise again. And your nature, you're not failing, you're cycling. And that's where reinvention gets juicy the moment you stop labelling your experiences as good or bad, you free yourself to actually use them. You got dumped. Great. Now you know what doesn't fit, and you don't have to worry about some also anymore. Win, win, win a win a chicken dinner. Lost your job, broken a bone. Perfect universe just cleared your calendar. Had a meltdown, fabulous, something easy to break, to let the light in. I'm not saying bypass the pain, absolutely not feel it fully, then flip it and ask yourself, What's the equal and opposite opportunity in this? Because polarity means if despair exists, so does hope, if failure exists, so does rebirth. They're two sides of the same coin, and you get to choose which side you spend, which side you're spending. Love. Perspective is your superpower. Two people can live through exactly the same event, exactly the same event, even identical twins. One breaks, one builds, same storm, different steering wheel, and the difference in all of it is perception. You can look at the rain and complain that you're soaking bloody wet, or you can dance in it and realise you're alive when something bad happens, you don't just rush to make it mean something catastrophic. Ask yourself instead, how could this be working for me? What's the good in this, even if I can't see it yet, and that question alone will change your life, promise you, because reinvention always starts with disruption, the job loss, the breakup, the diagnosis, the burnout, those are the dark poles that pull you towards something brighter. Every reinvention I've ever had came after a breakdown, not once after a perfectly fine Tuesday, the breakdown clears the space for the rebuild. You think it's destruction, but it's actually construction. You're being dismantled back to your foundation so you can rebuild with truth instead of some illusion. That's polarity in action, life's taking away what's bullshit, so there's room for what's real. So the next time something collapses, ask yourself, What if this isn't punishment? What if this is preparation for something epic. So if you want to start living by the law of polarity, here's some tips. Number one, name the polarity, when something feels awful. Name its opposite, lost. Okay? That means clarity is possible. Rejected, that means alignment is closer. Grieving, that means love existed. Which brings me to number two, find the lesson early. Don't wait six months for hindsight. Ask yourself now, what's this teaching me today? What could be the good in this? And thirdly, detach from labels. Stop please. Stop calling things good or bad. Call it information, data to analyse. It's just data. Become a detective of your own life. What's the data showing you? And also let contrast create compassion. The more darkness you've lived, the more empathy you carry. Use that. It's your depth. It's a superpower. Honestly, trust the pendulum. If life has swung hard, one way, it sure as hell was going to swing back. Always. Your only job is to stay centred while it does. There was a time years ago when everything collapsed at once, right for me, marriage ended. Career was wobbling. My confidence was shot to fucking pieces. I thought I was being punished, but looking back now, that version of me had to fuck off. She had to dissolve. I couldn't become this version, this one speaking to you right now, without that polarity, without that darkness, showing me what this light even was. And I know you've had those moments too. I know you have the nights that felt endless, the losses that gutted you, the times that you whispered to yourself, I can't do this, and then somehow did that's polarity, that's transformation in disguise. So let's land this plane with a little stoic truth bomb. You can't control what happens come, but you can control what it means that's your power. That's where reinvention starts. The law of polarity doesn't say everything's easy. It says everything's useful. It says you can't have the light without the dark, but the dark doesn't last forever. It's just the contrast that helps you see the light when it comes so whatever's falling apart right now, whatever show you're in, maybe it's not the end. Maybe it's just the in between, the halfway point between who you were and who you're becoming the messy middle, if you like, because the truth is, we all fall somewhere on the spectrum, like for example. Let's wrap this up for today. Some of us are morning larks. We're up early, bright eyed and bushy tailed, ready to take on the world by 6am others of us a night house. We're alive at 11 o'clock at night and dead inside at 7am some of us, we're none of the above because we're permanently fucking exhausted pigeons trying our level best. But polarity applies here as well. You don't have to be a morning person to have a powerful morning. I'm a morning person, but believe you, me, I have a powerful morning every morning. You just need a way to start your day in the right energy, whatever time it is. So, whether you're a night owl who wakes up feeling like a Victorian chimney sweep of a morning Lark who wants to feel more in control and a bit less chaos from the minute you open your eyes then lovingly sort your shit out, not with a militant routine, not with ice baths, not with a 4am spiritual awakening you didn't ask for, but with seven minutes. That's it, seven minutes. So we need seven minutes to regulate your nervous system, wake up your brain properly, and start your day like the version of you who actually leads her life, not reacts to it. Make it happen for you, not to you. So if you're ready to shift your mornings, whether you're a lark, an owl or some kind of Gremlin with responsibilities, check out the Queen of reinvention.com. For the badass power morning bundle. It's in the show notes as well. Seven minutes, seven pounds, 77 massive ripple effect. Mahusive. And if you've taken something from today's episode that had little spark in you, then do please come follow me on the old gram and all.

Sarah Elizabeth  29:59

At queen of reinvention will follow you right back love, okay, but it's that's it for today. But remember, contrast doesn't break you. It builds you. Light follows dark meaning. Follows mess the glow up, follows the shitstorm, and you are smack in the middle of becoming someone fucking extraordinary, and with that, I will be back in your beaut badass earbuds again next week. So until then, I'm sending you all the love and light you need. Bye.