About a week ago, after beating my husband Carlos and new friend Becki at Risk, I realized something—I really have changed as a person these last few months. I don’t think I had fully noticed it until now. Sometimes it’s worthwhile to take a moment, put a pin in where you are, and notice how far you have come, even compared to just a few short weeks ago.

Self-mastery. This is something that I think I have been working on a lot lately, without putting that phrase to it. It’s been uncomfortable, and I have placed my undivided attention on it because I want nothing to distract me from this. I want self-mastery, and if there is a way to get it all at once, even if it is more difficult, I would rather break 1,000 veils at once than break them one by one from now on. 

I read something on Pinterest the other day that read “the greatest skill one can develop is decreasing the time between idea and execution.” I love this idea. I think to do this, to reduce the time between idea and execution, and execution to completion, one must develop a great skill—one I’d argue is greater than this one. I think the greatest skill one can develop is to embrace fear of change, of challenge, of the unknown. Take it on, hold it, hug it. Watch the fear dissipate into excitement, adventure, and curiosity. I think this is possible, and this is what I have been facing head on these last few months, more than any particular project or worldly goal.

Back up a few months ago, I was telling my friend Melody how I wanted to learn to sew. A craft enthusiast who seems to be able to make everything, Melody told me “I saw a sewing class on Instragram!” and sent me the ad. And it was in that way that I would become familiar with Hilvan Espacio Creativo, here in Mexico City, in the colonia of Escandon 1. To say it was easy to sign up for the class would be a true statement. But other parts of the experience would be hard.

When I planned my trip to California to see my family, I knew that I would unfortunately have to forgo the first class, so I messaged Hilvan and let them know, and they told me I could come early to take the make-up class. My mom loves to take classes. She was one of my inspirations for choosing to do this, and I was reminded of that while I visited my parents. Everyone was excited for me to begin my classes—my dad even already asked me to sew him something. As I walked up to the Hilvan that first fateful day, I did not know that I would be receiving lessons not just in sewing, but also in patience, persistence, focus, trusting yourself, Spanish, and following a guide.

I was amazed that after being taught to turn on the machine and thread it, I was immediately allowed to use it. “The first thing you’re going to learn,” Lola, the instructor, told me in Spanish, “is not to be scared of the machine.” And so I did. I was given a little piece of rigid beige fabric to practice on, a fabric much more “noble,” as Lola would say, than the fabrics we’d truly want to wear. And like that, suddenly, I was sewing.

It takes a great deal of attention to that tiny spot, the guide, to sew. And I was not good at it. In fact I was amazed at how bad I was at sewing a straight line. The machine is agnostic of course. It will sew in the way it is fed. Following the guide, the tiny piece of the machine where you must keep your eyes with intent focus at all times, is of the utmost importance. My lines were decidedly crooked. I have built world class brands and apps. How could something so small be so hard?

Remate. I guess that is the Spanish word for knot? All of my sewing knowledge is now in Spanish, and this made the class all the more harder as I was not familiar with the specific sewing language and am still learning. Remate. Line. Chueco. That means crooked. Inclinado. Slanted, or inclined. These are some new words I learned via sewing class.

There was and still is so much to learn! Having thought of myself as a learned person, trying to take on a new skill like sewing made me realize what a baby I am at so many things, assuming I have even tried them. All along I thought I knew something about the world, here comes this category such as sewing in which I know nothing! Now just think how many other categories I don’t know anything about!

My first class was tough as it felt like everyone was so ahead of me. But after several weeks of coming a little early, I had finally caught up with the rest of the class. Heck, I was even a little ahead at some point. I received my certificate of completion for the course last Saturday. It felt good to hold that in my hands. It was placed in the red folder that I got later than everyone else, which never got my name put on it in permanent marker. The certificate lives there alongside my assignments. 

One of my last assignments was to learn to make curved lines. Now for some reason, curved lines, I get. This assignment was incredibly easy for me. It was almost too easy. It was not perfect, but I also had by this point understood that the point of the assignments were meant to teach us something, not for us to do them perfectly, and this made the assignments easier. The assignments would not replace where experience and practice will fill in, in the future, so I could throw myself into the ocean of learning without judging myself or criticizing myself for not achieving a particular result. This makes me wonder how much this attitude could serve us in all parts of life, if we could just take it on.

When I got home the day of that last class and showed my certificate to my husband, I was surprised to see the first assignment I did in the folder alongside it, the one where we learned the lines. Somehow, it looked so much more amateur than my work now, like the curved assignment. I realized, I still saw myself in that way, as the person who made the chueco lines the first day. By just throwing myself into the ocean of learning—I had learned! And I didn’t even notice.

In four short weeks, my skill level had changed, and had I not taken the time to notice, I think in my head I may have remained the girl with the chueco lines. I’ve grown. Now you can say I can sew. I can sew poorly, and I need more experience and practice, but I have some level of knowledge and skill, such that when we had to do our final project, I was able to complete it. I am now the proud owner of a shirt that I made.

It’s not perfect, but you know, it actually came out pretty well! I risked the potential feelings—irritations, embarrassment, discomfort, frustration, regret—to get to the other side of something. By dedicating myself to the learning process, I was able to deal with the discomfort of potentially messing up—of losing, or dying as we see it in day to day life. And somehow, quite without fanfare, I did indeed learn.

“Like everyone else, you want to learn the way to win, but never to accept the way to lose,” said Bruce Lee. “To accept defeat, to learn to die is to be liberated from it. So when tomorrow comes, you must free your ambitious mind, and learn the art of dying.”¹

Carlos and I have been taking an interest in Bruce Lee as of late, and this quote stuck with me. I have purposely and probably too intently diverted myself lately from being diverted. I have been completely unwilling to distract myself from what I have been feeling in this current epoch of life. And this is what I mean about being comfortable with discomfort. If you want to win—if you want to learn to sew, if you want to win at Risk—you need to be comfortable, truly comfortable, with seeing yourself fail, with seeing yourself lose. I have been unwilling to take myself off this practice during this time because I want nothing more than to learn the art of dying, so I can be free from fear.

Me, Becki, and Carlos learned to play Risk right then and there that night. It was a Sunday evening. My sweet friend, who I met in a hostel in December, came over with some vegetables and we roasted them, and then doused them with tahini for us to have dinner together—and for me to break my fast. 

The point of Risk is to eventually take over the world, not an easy feat even on a board game. The cards are dealt randomly and naturally, each person tries to take over the continents they seem to naturally have the advantage in. 

Becki naturally ended up having more coverage in Africa and South America and Carlos in Europe and North America. For me, my cards were mostly laid in Asia and Australia. I don’t know if you’ve played Risk, but if you have, you know Asia is the largest continent, and therefore the hardest one to take over. It, therefore, is also the most rewarding. 

I saw that I had no choice but to overwhelm my territories in Asia with firepower so as to be able to win. Normally I don’t like board games. For one, I find them hard to understand, definitely the result of Autism Spectrum Disorder. But also, it just feels like a lot of unnecessary brainpower to work out how to win, for something that doesn’t really matter. And at least that is what I used to think. But in this case, the point was to have fun, and sure, fun by trying to win. Why not go full force? 

I used to get overwhelmed with emotion when watching a TV show. Say the character does something really embarrassing and now has to suffer the repercussions. It was almost unbearable for me to watch scenes like that because I felt them a little too closely—like the empathy for the fictional character was uncomfortable to be with. Playing board games, where you’re supposed to win, was the same. I just couldn’t sit with the uneasy feeling of losing, which I normally do, and it just didn’t feel like it was worth risking that for a game.

But I have changed. I HAVE changed!

All along, we played, and I knew we were playing a board game. In the grand scheme of things, it did not matter. I was okay with losing. I have trained myself to lose. While one doesn’t have to win, one can play the game, so I played, with heart. 

It was fun to be winning when we decided to call it a night. Somehow by that point I had overwhelmed the force of both Becki and Carlos. I took Australia fairly quickly, though not without developing my strategy. 

Becki’s two troops kept my four or five out of western Australia, so when I got cold feet to continue, I allowed my turn to pass and decided to come back to Australia later. But I ended up in the same position later with my next turn—take Western Australia and be done with it or be meek and potentially be attacked by Becki. And I realized at that moment if I did not go for it, fully, I was not going to win. If you have nothing to lose, why not win? I added more troops to Eastern Australia, and my strategy was to go all in. ALL in. 

Weirdly, lately, I have found the best way to mitigate risk may be to risk it all. Go ALL in, right away. Don’t dilly dally, taking too long to make a decision, while time changes the circumstances. You know in your heart what you need to do, at any given time. DO it. Be brave. Call on all your courage at once and do what you need to do.

When attacked in a place where I had only, say, two troops, I always defended with both. I knew that if I defended with one, it made no difference, that Carlos and Becki would just attack again and again. Risk it all, all the time. It makes no difference. The outcome that is meant to happen, is going to happen. Once you learn to lose, you can really win. Win big. Go for it. Do it. Go all in.

Look, we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. None of it. If you think about it, you don’t even know what’s going to happen in this moment, the one right in front of your nose. You may be reading this from your house on your phone so you may think you know that, say, you’ll finish this, but there’s also nothing that says you don’t get a knock at the door that could change everything.

We don’t know anything as human beings. We don’t know what’s going to happen. For all of life. Our feeble human minds seemingly protect us and tell us that we know where the cards will land—we assume they will land the place they did last time. But the truth is, the future is unwritten. Anything can happen, anything can change. Why not embrace the fear of change or challenge—even by catalyzing it yourself?

As I played I knew there was no way to know where the dice would fall. But I could do two things—believe in a positive outcome for myself and the abundance that’s out there for me (yes, even maintaining that attitude down to playing board games), and use that unwavering faith to be foolishly unabashed, abrasive, aggressive—to be brave. Do NOT resign yourself to a fate that does not exist. If you don’t know what will happen in the future, why not just assume the very best, and be brave? The other option was to play it safe, and get safe results.

At some point I beat Carlos a few times in the Americas, where he had the majority of the continent, with just two soldiers. I threw a lackluster three but he threw a two—so I still won and got to keep my territory. Wow. 

I don’t sew the way I did four weeks ago and I don’t play board games the way I did three decades ago. Wow. 

Change is one of the only constants of life. Whether you love change or hate change probably has a lot to do with how much you have trained yourself to not resist change—train yourself to be comfortable with discomfort. Sit in it. Find a comfortable seat inside yourself. Find the courage it takes to do anything, until courage no longer feels like courage, but becomes just a part of you. 

Be one with change and you will be able to achieve anything you want in your life. Because most things that are worth it in life are rife with uncomfortable changes—either of your environment or in yourself. Don’t let fear scare you into staying still, because chances are, your life won’t let you anyway.

But beyond being comfortable with change, I think I learned something else that’s very valuable—which is acknowledging that you have changed. Allowing yourself to grow, and seeing yourself as grown. The other day, Carlos and I did my animal totem. As I flipped over the swan, Carlos told me, “I’m glad you got that.” I connected with Swan.

“Swan is a creature of such grace it is regarded as one of the most beautiful in the animal kingdom. But Swan’s story does not start that way. They are the ultimate symbol for change as they morph from clumsy cygnet to majestic swan. Swans remind us that …your life will be a continuous series of changes as you ascend to higher levels.”² We read the book together aloud. 

Imagine if I kept going sewing remembering my first assignment, or playing board games, and didn’t acknowledge how far I have come! How often are we holding ourselves back by seeing ourselves as versions of ourselves that are no longer here? This got me thinking. Maybe an important part of change is not just allowing yourself to do it, but also allowing yourself to change how you see yourself. “All things are possible. Who you are is limited only by who you think you are,” reads a quote from the Egyptian Book of the Dead.³

I am getting better at being uncomfortable with things, through practice, passion, and patience. My courageous voice is getting louder, and my brave face is coming out more often, and I am starting to remember who I have always been, that society told me to put away—a bit of a warrior. It’s nice to be able to acknowledge this, to see this. So far, my attempts to understand self-mastery have brought me back to myself. Not some esoteric concept of myself, but the version of myself I remember being when I was most young. Even things I am taking an interest in, like sewing, are interests long held by the earliest version of me.

Imagine ascending to higher and higher heights only to find a version of yourself you abandoned a long time ago. It has not been an easy journey, and some days, I still feel uncomfortable in the discomfort. But I would like to think that at the end I will get to enjoy the warm embrace of myself.

1. Lee, Bruce. Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living. Edited by John Little, Tuttle Publishing, 2000.

2. Bergsma, J. (2018). The Spirit of the Animals Oracle: A 51-Card Deck and Guidebook. Hay House.

3. Budge, E. A. W. (Trans.). (1967). The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Dover Publications.