It is around midnight on a Saturday night and I have spent the last hour laughing almost non-stop, celebrating and feeling celebrated by my friends. I am sitting on the floor petting Ernest, the 26-toed cat. Elena, Jocelyn, and Derek are on the couch and Thomas is across the room sitting on the floor too.

Jocelyn asks me a question about yoga, and I get fired up. I indulge her with a long response about the integrity of mindfulness based practices and how yoga is truly about moving into stillness, breathing through any struggle, releasing the body to listen inwardly to the mind, and then letting the mind be gentle and flowing like a wave. I packed in a lot of random information about the 8 limbs and the practice of yoga that I studied in India, the particulars of which I no longer recall.

When I stop, Jocelyn laughs and says, “Woah, you just spoke so fast and there was so much there.”

Suddenly, I am gripped with fear and sadness. “Oh no” escapes my mouth.

“No, no, it’s okay!” She says, but I get lost for a moment falling into my own worries.

And in a voice just above a whisper, I express, “Maybe that is why I am not getting any of the jobs I am interviewing for. Maybe I speak too fast. Maybe they can’t keep up, or they are worried that I won’t slow down.”

I look over at Jocelyn and say, “I should really work on speaking more slowly.”

Immediately, she responds, “No! You spoke incredibly articulately! It was just so fast and with so much information.”

I smile, then Thomas chimes in, “Yeah, I felt like you were going warp speed while you were talking but it was really cool because I felt like you were taking me on a voyage through time and space where all of these complex ideas where packed in really quickly and even though it was a challenge I liked that I felt like I was thinking at warp speed with you.”

Elena, Thomas, Jocelyn, and Derek all look at each other, and then look at me, nodding and reiterating comments like, “Yeah” and “Totally.”

I don’t know whether it hit me then or later, but I felt so incredibly accepted in that moment. I felt like one of my insecurities had been transformed in an instant into a magnificent super power. It was one of the greatest moments I have had all summer.