Written by Paula Margulis, a Perception & Leadership Strategist whose work explores the intersection of awareness, decision-making, and transformation. With a background spanning business, project management, and real estate, she helps individuals recognize patterns more clearly so they can lead, choose, and move forward with greater alignment and self-trust.
This reflective series examines pivotal experiences and the meaning revealed through looking back. Through themes of perception, identity, self-trust, and leadership, it explores how the stories we tell about our experiences can shape who we become.
We are three core character fundamentals into this journey of mine.
We began with the most present, powerful experience to note: the sale of my home and all that experience created.
From there, we went far back in time to my tween season and school transition, which revealed the onset of a long, hard season that would last 35 years: self-abandonment and adaptation for belonging.
Not too long after, I brought you into the fold of another revelation, this time at 16: I can create while being terrified, all thanks to Captain Autton.
Another shout-out for good measure.
Which brings us to my next core character turning point, at 19 years of age.
This was back in 1999.
Why this is relevant is because, back then, we experienced a Grade 13 before graduating. We had a whole other year to complete our studies.
I suppose we can acknowledge right here and right now that this was relevant to me.
I graduated with excellence and on time.
Yay!
How?
Ha!
By the skin of my teeth.
I barely put in any effort.
Which leads me to the story at hand….
For context, I began my journey with “party favors” early on in life. At 13, to be exact.
I started with smoking cigarettes and hash from a bottle toke and drinking beer.
This was the scope of it until high school, when weed and mushrooms were introduced.
Fairly humble beginnings… perhaps.
I had worked since I was 16 while studying, well, not so well.
There was a moment in time when things shifted on the cusp of turning 19, the legal drinking age.
I could say that as I indulged the party vibe, my gameplay in the other arenas of my life suffered.
I used to swim competitively, and after six years, it ended abruptly because I had new priorities.
I went from trying in class to not going to class.
My Mom, bless her heart, attempted to intervene and shift things. She would pick me up for lunch and bring me back to school in the hope that I would not get stoned and would actually go to class.
Oh Mom!
By the time I graduated and was of drinking age, I did get into a remedial animal care program at the local college, as my grades were not supportive of any other level in Veterinary Care, which was where I was leading myself in that season.
Things had also escalated in the party scene.
I dove headfirst into the club scene and went dancing every weekend.
This was a whole new world in terms of party favors.
At the time, I believed I needed “aides” to support my desire to dance all night, if you catch my drift.
Let’s just say I had quickly escalated down an undesirable path leading nowhere good.
Naturally, this came to a head fairly quickly in hindsight.
It didn’t take too long for my increasingly risky antics to be interrupted.
Love you, Mom!
On a beautiful summer evening, sitting on our front stoop as we did daily, no matter the weather, I came to learn that my ways of being were deeply affecting my family and that something had to change.
I was given a choice:
Rehab or leave.
This could look like an EPIC choice moment.
It was, for sure!
I can recall taking a beat with this offer.
I remember sitting there, overlooking the front yard that I had grown up looking at for 15 years already and, as it turned out, would continue to look at for another eight.
Ha!
I also remember exactly what I said:
“Mom, I know I haven’t given you a reason to believe in me, and that’s what I am asking. This is only a season. I know it.”
Let me stop here in the story to connect some dots.
The story isn’t fundamentally about drugs.
It isn’t fundamentally about my Mom.
It isn’t even fundamentally about the ultimatum.
It’s about the first time I heard myself.
Not the version of me reflected in my circumstances, as I have already articulated for you.
Not the evidence of my recent choices up until then.
Not the 19-year-old who wasn’t thriving.
Something underneath all of that spoke:
“Mom, I know I haven’t given you a reason to believe in me, and that’s what I am asking. This is only a season. I know it.”
Wow!
I was shocked by my own words, so to speak.
There was a wisdom, a knowing, a clarity that my otherwise rational mind did NOT have.
Clearly, I did not deny reality or defend my behavior.
I didn’t blame my Mom.
I didn’t make any grand gestures or imply future perfection.
With such a grounded, humble and clear conveyance, I acknowledged the evidence and then refused to mistake the evidence for my identity.
Because somehow, from inside a season of self-deprecation where my external behavior provided little evidence for self-trust, something in me knew that the person I was being was not the entirety of the person I was and am.
And then…
“I know it.”
Not I hope.
Not I think.
Not I swear I’ll change.
I know.
This is the origin point of my compass.
This was a foundational trust conversation with myself and, looking back, perhaps my first conscious experience of enrollment.
I saw a possibility for myself that the evidence did not yet support, believed it deeply enough to articulate it, and invited another human being to believe in it with me.
And for perhaps one of the first times, I allowed the deeper voice to have authority.
My Mom then did something equally consequential: she apparently allowed that voice to matter too.
She presented two outcomes, rehab or leaving home, and ultimately neither occurred.
I didn’t go to rehab and I didn’t leave home.
I wouldn’t make assumptions about everything happening for her internally, but in the observable outcome, she gave me the opportunity I asked for.
I asked another human being to believe in something I could perceive before I could prove it.
It would not be the last.
Looking back now, I can see that the most consequential choice I made that evening wasn’t rehab or leaving home.
It was choosing to trust a voice within me whose knowing had no external evidence to support it.
My circumstances told one story.
My behavior told another.
And somewhere underneath both, something in me knew there was more.
That voice would become increasingly familiar over the years.
Sometimes I would listen.
Sometimes I wouldn’t.
Sometimes the evidence around me would make trusting it feel almost ridiculous.
But I had heard it once, clearly enough to know it existed.
Perhaps that is where self-trust begins, not when we have accumulated enough evidence to prove ourselves right, but when we become willing to recognize the wisdom within us before the evidence arrives.
At 19, sitting beside my Mom on our front stoop, I didn’t know I was discovering my compass.
I only knew what it told me:
This is only a season. I know it.
Previous in the series: One Story or Another: Early Years
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