I’ve been asking myself lately whether I should renew my acupuncture license.
It’s not the first time I’ve asked the question, but this time it feels different.
The renewal fee is $500 — not an insubstantial amount — and I haven’t practiced in over a year and a half. I could keep it in inactive status like before, just in case, but that feels like a form of clinging. The truth is, I don’t think I’m going back to clinical practice anytime soon, maybe ever.

It’s only a piece of paper, but it carries a strange weight. For years, that license was a kind of anchor. It said: You’re legitimate. You belong. You’re someone who helps people heal. I didn’t realize how much I leaned on that small rectangle of validation — how it made me feel authorized to take up space in a field that, in its own way, defined my sense of worth.

But lately I’ve been wondering whether the form that once gave my work structure has already dissolved, and I just haven’t caught up yet.

What the License Represented

The license was never just about legal permission to practice. It symbolized something larger — a way of belonging, of proving that I had earned the right to serve others.
It represented years of study, the precision of the diagnostic process, the intimacy of helping another person find balance again.
It also represented a time in my life when my purpose felt clearer, because it had a form I could point to. A treatment room. A schedule. Needles. Results.

When I think back on that, I don’t feel regret. I feel gratitude. That part of my path taught me how to listen deeply — to the body, to the subtle language of imbalance, to the quiet places where suffering hides.
But the more I step into teaching and writing, the more I realize that none of that learning depends on the credential.
The real work continues, just through different hands.

When the Form No Longer Fits

In Daoism, every form has its season. The acupuncturist’s robe, like a leaf on a tree, has its time to grow, mature, and eventually fall.
Holding onto an identity past its natural cycle doesn’t keep it alive — it keeps it from transforming.
I’ve spent much of my life building structures to feel secure: credentials, titles, routines, rules. But at some point, those structures start to feel less like support and more like confinement.

Letting the license go doesn’t mean I’m abandoning the healer in me. It means I’m letting that part of myself take on a new form.
What once moved through my needles now moves through words.
What once flowed through the pulse beneath my fingertips now flows through a paragraph, a conversation, a quiet moment of recognition in someone reading this.

Taking Up Space Without Permission

As I’ve been sitting with this decision, I’ve noticed something deeper underneath it — an old belief that I still need external permission to take up space.
That piece of paper made me feel like I had earned my right to exist in the healing world. Without it, there’s a small voice that asks, Who do you think you are now?

Maybe that’s the real transformation happening here.
The work isn’t just about letting the old form die — it’s about allowing my sense of worth to stand on its own, unverified, unlicensed, unapproved.
Healing, after all, isn’t just about curing illness; it’s about seeing where we’ve tied our value to forms that were never meant to last.

Transformation Without Loss

In Daoist philosophy, nothing is ever truly lost. The leaf that falls becomes nourishment for the next season’s growth.
The same qi that animated one form simply takes on another. Death and birth are not opposites — they’re a single movement in different directions.

When I think about letting the license lapse, I try to see it through that lens.
The knowledge, the sensitivity, the experience — none of that disappears. It simply circulates differently now.
Instead of a clinic, my medium is words. Instead of patients, I have readers. Instead of treatments, I offer understanding.

The Dao doesn’t cling to forms. It transforms them. And maybe that’s all I’m being asked to do — to let this one form dissolve so the essence of it can flow more freely through what comes next.

What Remains After Letting Go

I still haven’t made a final decision about the renewal. Maybe I will let it expire. Maybe I’ll hold onto it one more cycle.
But what matters more is what this question revealed — that letting go of a form doesn’t mean losing what gave it meaning.

There’s grief in this kind of release, yes. But there’s also relief — a quiet exhale that comes when you stop needing the old structure to prove your worth.

Every ending asks for faith: that what’s falling away is making room for something truer.
Maybe that’s the deeper renewal here — not the one printed on a certificate, but the one that happens when you trust that who you are now is enough.