On the morning of my 42nd birthday, I woke up in a pile of boxes with a dysregulated cat meowing at my door.

The day before, I'd moved out of our 400-square-foot ADU where the girls and I shared a bedroom and into a little house on Santa Barbara's west side—twice the size, though still wonderfully small.

I looked out at the chaos—the cobbling together of things I've somehow named my life—and realized the last time I moved on my birthday was exactly half a lifetime ago.

I was 21. I had just graduated from UC Berkeley and, with youthful naivete, was moving to the Tenderloin district in San Francisco, a gritty soup of dive bars, corner stores, homelessness and drug addiction. There were six of us total, schlepping my array of manual typewriters and vintage purses down a spiral staircase. I made everyone white tank tops with "Beth's Moving Crew" scribbled across them in Sharpie. It was a season of life when people had time to spare. Energy to share. A time when pizza and beer were sufficient payment for a full day of hauling furniture down narrow hallways.

That move ushered in a season of my life that was, in many ways, dark. I spent much of my twenties drinking too much, working in restaurants, feeling lost and directionless. When I look at the young adventure babies I often employ at forest school now—who drift away to travel, surf, hike, and fall in love with the world—I sometimes grieve those years. I spent so much of that decade buried under my own avoidance, disconnected from my body, disconnected from myself. I drank so much because I hurt so hard. I didn't know how to be with my own pain.

And yet, looking back now, I understand that those years had a purpose.

I was building my own love for myself by going deep into my shadows, into the parts of me that ached, into pain and disconnection. All of that discomfort became the ground from which everything else grew. My roots were deep. Eventually I became so weary of living that way that I began the long process of becoming someone else: more embodied, more present, more self-aware, more alive.

Half a lifetime later, days after my 42nd birthday, I woke up crying over curtains.

Which was, of course, not about the curtains. I bought them; a beautiful friend came over to hang them for me. I had a vision, I had a longing to cocoon, to feel safe, to be in a space that for once really feels like mine. A space in which I have sovereignty, privacy, safety, room to exhale.

This move feels significant. In some ways, it feels like the first truly new chapter since those San Francisco years. Kentucky, marriage, babies—all of it now feels like a liminal space between who I was and who I am becoming. And with that comes an enormous amount of pressure.

Pressure to make this home beautiful. Pressure to have a vision. Pressure to arrange everything perfectly and create something that feels safe and welcoming and glorious.

What I am accepting, reluctantly, is that a home isn't created all at once. It emerges. It reveals itself. It often comes through mistakes. From curtains that are too beige and colors that don't fit together.

That kind of emergence requires presence. It requires being the one who touches everything, who makes the choices, who sits with what doesn't work yet.

During this process, people kept recommending services that will pack and unpack everything for you. In some ways it makes sense—running a business and parenting two children is a full-time job—but I still decidedly don't want someone else to go through my things. I want to see what I've accumulated. I want to decide what stays and what leaves. I want to wipe the gunk from the bottom of my cupboards and feel where the spices will best live in my new kitchen. I want to make choices, to fumble through the discomfort of arranging and rearranging. I want to witness the process.

I want to take part in the accounting of my own life..

When I moved to Kentucky, everyone told me to fly, but I wanted to drive. I wanted to see the land between California and Louisville—the stretch between the life I lived and the life I was choosing next. I wanted to spread out the moments, each one a frame in a movie reel, like if I watched closely enough I could see the little flicker between frames. Who am I? Who am I now? Who am I next? I wanted to experience the distance instead of skipping over it.

And that's what this week feels like.

My dining room table and chairs that were perfect in my old house are clunky and misplaced here. I don't own a dresser, so all my clothes are living in plastic tubs under my bed. I don't own any rugs, so the rooms are just wide expanses of painted teal floors. Sound echoes. There is discomfort in being between what was and what will be. There is impatience. There is uncertainty. There is the temptation to rush ahead to the finished version.

The cat is roving through the house crying, howling a deep lonely howl. She's restless at night, agitated, skittering. I can hear her internal monologue, because it's the same as mine. Who am I now? Where has my security gone? Am I safe?

She looks to me and I can't comfort her, because I don't know. What anchored me feels gone. The chairs no longer fit. I've done the accounting and what was no longer works and what will be isn't yet. I'm in the liminal space.

more of the actual vibe of my birthday/ current life

My deep belief is this is where we always are. We're always shifting, always becoming, always changing. Nothing is constant, but we can organize enough of our typical daily lives to feel like it is, to become complacent. When we make bold changes, we recognize how fleeting everything is, how impermanent. The flicker between frames becomes visible and there is beauty and terror there.

This morning I woke up and felt it again—the tremor. The low-grade sadness of always reaching away from my own experience. The exhaustion of being a person who is very good at distraction, who knows all the right things to buy and arrange and curate in order to avoid the feeling underneath.

So instead of opening a browser tab, I called Michael.

Within the hour I was in his office, crying. About curtains, yes. But also about the feeling of being unsettled, of being stretched too thin across versions of myself. My table no longer fitting. My friendships shifting in ways I can't quite name. Relationships in motion. The particular loneliness of being in between—not who I was, not yet who I'm becoming, just this raw unfinished person standing in a house with teal floors and no rugs.

And what I did was cry. Just that. I cried and I didn't try to solve it. I didn't research the right rug or scroll for the perfect nightstand or make a list. I let it come up. I let myself be human—soft and in-process and not okay, and also okay.

Michael always repeating softly, gently, after my litany of pains, "And you're okay."

At some point I asked to get on the table. Michael does hands-on energy work—I don't know exactly what to call it, only that it heals me, has always healed me, in ways I can't fully explain and have stopped trying to. And so I lay there while something in me that had been scattered began to collect. The pieces of me stopped reaching. I felt myself land.

After, Michael was quiet for a moment. He said I had been surrounded by angels. He hadn’t seen that in a long time.

I believe him. I believe him completely.

And I thought: this is my home. Not the teal floors or the curtains or the furniture that doesn't fit yet. Not the vision I'm still assembling. Home is this—the landing. The returning. The moment when I stop running from my own experience and just let myself be in it, fully, until something loosens and I can breathe again.

I'm learning that I can't buy my way there. I can't arrange my way there. I can only cry my way there, or sit still long enough to let the angels catch up.

And apparently, they already have.

I want to say something true about 42. Something I can wrap up and hand to you, the way I do every year— a birthday dispatch, hard-won and clear-eyed, a little gift of meaning-making from me to you. But I don't have it yet. I haven't lived it yet. This missive is not that. This is the frame before the frame. The drive across the country before I know what I'm driving toward.

What I know is this: I'm in it. The discomfort and the angels and the cat howling and the curtains that are too beige and the table that no longer fits. The flicker between who I was and who I'm becoming is visible right now, and I'm trying to stay in it instead of rushing to the other side.

I'll let you know what I find.