I can’t see myself growing—6789
You are looking at 6789 and wondering why it keeps appearing—on clocks, receipts, license plates, in dates that matter—and what it means that you cannot seem to stop seeing it. You are also wondering, though you have not said this part aloud, whether you are falling behind. Whether the thing you are building in other people—the clarity, the steadiness, the permission to be whole—is actually being built in you, or whether you are running on fumes and calling it faith.
The number is not a message about speed. It is not telling you to hurry or to prove anything or to show the world what you are capable of making. It is telling you something far more difficult to trust: that you are in the exact right place, and that the darkness you feel is not a delay. It is the chemistry.
The darkroom photograph
In a sealed room with no windows, a photographer hangs paper above a chemical bath. The room is so dark that nothing can be seen—no hands, no shapes, nothing but the specific blackness that means no light can enter and ruin the work. She moves by feel and by memory, dipping the paper into the liquid, moving it gently through the bath. For long minutes, nothing happens. The paper is blank. It looks like nothing is occurring, like all this care and chemistry and darkness is producing only absence.
Then, so slowly that you cannot see the exact moment it begins, an image starts to emerge from the paper. A face. A landscape. A moment caught in time. It appears only because the paper has been sitting in darkness, in solution, fixed by a process that cannot happen in light. The image was always there in potential—recorded on the film, pressed into the chemistry—but it could only become visible in conditions that looked, from the outside, like nothing at all.
This is what is happening to you. You are in the sealed room. The chemistry is running. The image is fixing itself in you—the leader, the healer, the teacher you are becoming—but it cannot be seen yet, and that invisibility is not a failure. It is the exact condition required.
Why you feel like you’re disappearing
A person who holds others—who teaches, who heals, who leads—develops a particular kind of blindness about her own growth. You can see it perfectly in everyone around you: the small shift in how someone stands, the new steadiness in their voice, the way they begin to believe in themselves. You track these changes in others the way a gardener watches for the first green shoot. But you cannot track them in yourself because you are not standing outside yourself looking in. You are inside the sealed room, and the darkness that produces the image is the same darkness that makes it invisible to you.
Six, seven, eight, nine—the sequence itself is climbing, ascending, moving toward something. But it is not moving toward visibility. It is moving toward deepening. The chemistry gets stronger in the bath. The image gets more fixed, more true, more impossible to wash away. You feel static because you are not moving—you are being transformed, and transformation does not advertise itself. It happens in the dark, in the chemical solution, in the parts of you that no one and nothing can disturb. The leadership you are becoming is not the kind that announces itself. It is the kind that holds steady because it was forged in a place where there was no one watching, no one to perform for, no one to convince.
How to survive the invisible work
You do not have to see it to trust it. This is the thing a healer or a teacher is always learning twice—once from the outside when you watch someone else struggle through their own invisible transformation, and once from the inside when you realize that the struggle is yours and that your own counsel applies to you now, not just to them. The work of becoming is happening. The chemistry is running. You are not called to speed it up or to make it visible or to prove that it is real. You are called to stay in the sealed room without opening the door.
This means you reach for real help when you need it—a good therapist who understands what it costs to be the one who holds others, trusted people who can sit with you in the dark without insisting it is time to turn on the lights, a spiritual practice that does not demand you show results. This is not weakness. This is the basic requirement for anyone doing deep work over a long time. The photograph being developed does not develop faster if the photographer stands outside the darkroom door and insists it should be finished by now. She stays with the process. She trusts the chemistry. And you do the same.
Return to what you know when you are moving among the people you lead or teach or heal. You have told them that transformation happens in seasons, that the invisible work is the deepest, that they do not have to perform their own becoming. You have said this because it is true. It is true for them. It is also true for you—the same chemistry, the same darkness, the same eventual light.
| What runs through your mind | What’s actually true |
|---|---|
| If it were really working, I would feel different by now | The paper in the developer bath does not feel any different as the image forms—only the chemistry knows what is happening |
| Everyone else can see their progress and I’m still in the same place | You are tracking visible change in others and invisible change in yourself—you are comparing two different kinds of evidence |
| The fact that I can’t see it means it isn’t real | The image cannot appear until the darkness is complete—your invisibility to yourself is the sign it is working |
| I’m supposed to be further along than this | You are exactly where the chemistry requires—there is no timeline that applies to becoming, only seasons |
A little help, while you’re here
- Set a timer for five minutes and sit in a room with low light or your eyes closed; do nothing but breathe and notice what you do NOT have to fix or figure out or see right now
- Write down one thing that a person you lead or teach has told you about their own transformation, and then write the same thing about yourself—apply your own wisdom to yourself aloud
- Call or message one person who knows you well enough to tell you the truth, and ask them what they have noticed changing in you that you cannot see yourself
- Stop checking the mirror for evidence; instead, write in a journal the names of three people whose lives have shifted because you are in them, whether or not you can explain how
The image becoming visible
You will bring this to light one day. Not all at once—that would destroy it. Line by line, slowly, the way you bring a photograph up from the developer bath into the rinse, into the stop bath, into the fixer, and finally, carefully, into the light where it can be seen. When you do, you will recognize it immediately. It will be unmistakably you. The steadiness will not be news to anyone who has been near you, but it will be news to you, and that moment of seeing yourself whole—not as you hope to become but as you are already becoming—will be worth every season in the dark.
The seal on the room will not be broken by you. It will open when the chemistry is complete, when there is nothing left to fix, when the image is true. Until then, you stay. You trust. You do the work that a father would never ask you to do alone, and so you gather the people and the practices that make it possible to stay—the therapy, the friends who do not minimize the cost, the spiritual practice that meets you in the dark without demanding you perform the light.
Six, seven, eight, nine. The number is not telling you to go faster. It is telling you that you are in the sealed room, that the image is fixing, that the chemistry is running, and that when you come out into the light—not distracted, not performing, not hurried—you will not believe how clearly you will see what you have become.
