On keeping pace with the moon.

I'm doing the dishes when José González comes on. I haven't heard his voice in years, but within the first few notes, I'm back in my twenties, living on Broderick Street in San Francisco, at the top of an ornate, three-story Victorian walk-up.

There were only six apartments in the building. Directly below mine, I discovered, lived a Spaniard named Gerardo.

We met at a debaucherous party my roommate and I hosted, a night deserving of its own story, involving dancing, miniature cupcakes hurled at the walls, and tampons left aggressively in the bathtub. I don't remember exactly how Gerardo and I found each other in the midst of all this, but sometime afterward, he invited me downstairs.

THE party. (Gerardo, not pictured)

It was there that he introduced me to José González.

Nearly every song on Veneer is crystallized around one or two evenings in Gerardo's apartment. He spoke German, as did I. I remember him reading poetry aloud to me, in both Spanish and German. I remember the way he touched my fingernails, tenderly, almost absently, with an intimate attentiveness I hadn't encountered much in my early twenties. I remember the feeling of being regarded in this way, of having someone's attention without having to do anything to hold it.

Gerardo seemed to have stepped out of a Salinger novel. There was something vaguely European and intellectual about the whole affair: the poetry, the music, the apartment downstairs, the extraordinary familiarity of someone touching my fingernails. It was precisely the sort of romance my twenty-something self was inclined to mythologize.

And mythologize it I did.

Almost immediately after we first connected, I learned that he had a girlfriend who'd been living abroad. She returned to San Francisco, moved into his apartment, discovered my existence, and began stalking me at the neighborhood bar where I worked, just around the corner.

So much for romance.

And yet, twenty years later, none of that is what I remember first when I hear José González. I remember the couch where we draped ourselves along the wall of Gerardo's apartment. The poetry. His hands on mine. The strange and exquisite feeling of being young and having an entire evening to spend in someone else's company, unconcerned with time or the care of anyone else.

I'm standing at my kitchen sink now, fifteen or so days into a long stretch of solo parenting. There are dishes to wash, meals to make, children to tend to, an endless succession of small domestic obligations that seem to regenerate the moment I finish them. And here, in the middle of it all, is this music, pulling some decades-old version of me into the room.

I'm astonished, as I always am, by the way music does this. Not simply reminding us of something, but returning us to it. The memory arrives in the body before the mind has even had time to identify it. And the memories contain memories. First, the fingernails. Then, my inadvertent participation in a betrayal of his girlfriend. First, he was a living legend of sorts, and then an insecure scoundrel, seeking the intimate attention of other women when he'd already promised himself to another.

I marinate in the intensity of that ricochet. I've lived there my whole life—volleying between extremes, wanting to categorize something as good or bad. Make it simple. The things most intimate to me, I somehow want to be cleanly categorized.

But somewhere in my mind, Michael's voice says, There are no problems, only opportunities.

These days, I can often land there, in gratitude for whatever shows up. I can eventually see the goodness in whatever feels interminably bad in the moment.

Challenging this perception was the beginning of our current school year, overshadowed by an extremely unglamorous battle with hemorrhoids.

Something set off my gut, which made my butt explode, which caused nonstop, searing, radiating pain that made me sick to my stomach. I began guarding my entire pelvic area, eventually inflaming it to the point that I felt a near-constant, burning need to pee. All of which prevented me from sleeping for more than forty minutes at a time. For over three weeks.

BAD.

I felt so heavy in my pain, so desperate for solutions, so deeply alone and hopeless, and also weirdly ostracized by what a socially unacceptable topic of conversation it was. I was wincing and occasionally weeping my way through the school days, equal parts totally exhausted and afraid to go to sleep because of how much louder the pain felt through those sleepless nights.

Bad, bad, bad.

And I felt so stuck in that badness. I floundered through my spiritual practices and then, alternately, medicine and my near-total lack of healthcare, throwing spaghetti at the wall in a desperate attempt to get myself through it.

Eventually, I gave up.

I stopped trying to fix it, cure it, change it, or be virtuous enough that it would disappear. I stopped littering my body with a combination of pharmaceuticals and internal vitriol. I let myself accept that this was what was happening, that I was in pain, and that I didn't have to make something meaningful out of it.

I rested. I sat with the pain. I didn't go to work. I watched TV and cried and sat in the bathtub for hours throughout the hottest days of the year, trusting that my body was doing whatever it needed to do.

And, eventually, it shifted.

At the culmination of this journey, just as the wheel turned, we had an uncharacteristic trip to Disneyland planned. I'd sworn I'd never go, but some of our dearest friends had invited us for a day trip, and with them, and them only, my answer was yes.

And yet again, I found myself anticipating the experience in extremes. Either this adventure would erase the suffering of several miserable weeks with the promise of the Happiest Place on Earth, or I'd loathe every minute of it.

Too much stimulation, too many transitions, too many people, too much noise. Too much of everything that rattles my slow and quiet internal world.

As the day approached, I found myself wishing Disneyland would burn down. I found myself wishing everyone's stuffy noses would turn into a tidal wave of illness that kept us homebound. My anxiety about what was to come was the most extreme thing of all.

And when the day came, with Disneyland and our relative health both very much still intact, we arrived.

The girls, as it turns out, are roller coaster fanatics. They don't care about or recognize almost any Disney characters. They found lines longer than a few minutes insufferable and the intricate details of nearly everything around them completely magical. There was an abundance of joy between them and their friends, and after ten hours and nearly ten miles of walking, they were kept afloat by churros, root beer floats, and the hum of magic that truly is everywhere in the air at Disneyland.

I was immediately and unrelentingly overstimulated and exhausted, and also profoundly relieved to have to make zero decisions about anything, because our beloved friends simply toted us around from one ride and experience to the next.

We walked out beaming and exhausted, and a still-stubborn part of me wanted to call it, remember it as, a perfect day.

Somewhere on the 405, Bonnie began having what can only be described as an exorcism, screaming in pain because her legs hurt from so much walking. She insisted that I both rub them and keep driving so she could get home, and the sheer absurdity of the moment leveled me out once again.

It's as though my brain is participating in a constant hunt, my mind shouting hot! or cold! in response to every given moment.

What if it's just warm? What if the temperature is constantly fluctuating? What if it's all swirled together and this is life? Not one long smear of Instagram-reel happiness, nor one melancholy saga of suffering, but a tumble of constant highs and lows. What if the real suffering is in my attachment to holding on to any of it?

Somehow, I managed to rub Bonnie's legs while I drove. One hand reaching into the back seat, one hand on the wheel. The split life, the split roles, the split woman. The multitasker. The duality. The tenderness and the pain.

Eventually, she fell asleep.

I spent the rest of the ride home alongside a vibrant crescent moon, listening to Laura Veirs. Her album Saltbreaks belongs to the beginning of my relationship with Nic. Another kind of longing, deeper than Gerardo. One of transformation, of changing tides.

I was dropping the girls at his house that evening and found myself thinking of him. Of these babies we'd birthed, this life we'd dreamed of, the way it had warped and wefted into something neither of us could have imagined.

I wasn't sad. And I wasn't happy. I was just riding alongside the moon, feeling the aching stretch of experience. How we change in ways we could never expect.

There is something about driving that allows you to be a person between moments, suspended in time between realities. The girls were asleep behind me. The day was over, but I hadn't quite arrived at the next thing. There was nothing left to orchestrate, no one to entertain, no immediate demand to meet. Just the road, the music and its memories, and this triumphant little moon keeping pace with us.

I watched it through the windshield, appearing and disappearing as the road curved, and thought about how many versions of myself had traveled beneath it. The young woman listening to José González in a stranger's apartment. The woman falling in love with Nic. The mother of two tiny babies. The woman who had eventually left the life she'd imagined for herself and was now driving those babies, not so tiny anymore, to their father's house.

All of them somehow here, in the car, beneath the same moon.

When we got to his house, the girls sleepily stumbled upstairs, and I kissed them a million times in their daddy's-house beds. It struck me that this was the first time in probably over four years that Nic and I had put our babies to bed together.

At one point, he put his hand on my lower back.

It didn't feel strange to me, but I did notice it. Today, it reminds me of Gerardo touching my fingernails. How these tiny moments—almost banal gestures of physical touch—anchor my human experience. What becomes abstract in memory and thought is made tangible when another human makes contact with me. It's no longer good or bad. It's music and temperature and touch.

A meditation I listened to recently invited me to feel what it actually feels like to be in my body. Not to live within the story I've created about it, or my imagination of what it must be like to inhabit it, but to actually be there. To feel it.

The idea startled me. How often am I living beneath the albatross of my own mind? Under the thick weight of stories that have somehow calcified into reality? How does my body actually feel?

It was surprisingly difficult to access.

Often, my body feels horrible. I'm still tired in my bones most days. Occasionally my butthole is falling out, my gut is churning, I can't sleep, and I'm going crazy with the relentless demands of life. But surely there are pauses in which all is well. Moments when I feel fine, or even happy and whole. Do I notice those, too?

Rarely, it seems. I've become so accustomed to monitoring and assessing myself, trying to fix and optimize, that even healing has somehow become an aggression against myself. An impatience. An insistence. An intolerance.

I recently decided to begin hormone replacement therapy. It felt deeply aligned to give my body back some of the regulating hormones that seemed to be waning. I met with a progressive nurse practitioner in private practice who specializes in hormone therapy.

Her office was less a medical establishment than a magazine-worthy home, complete with a fluffy dog greeting me at the door and a glass of slightly bitter lemonade waiting at my seat, a sprig of lavender beside the cup. It was all so precious, so personal.

She listened to my story in detail. Not just my lab work, but my experience. She recommended starting estrogen right away.

And then, somewhere in our conversation, sprinkled among my hopes for a more robust life, she mentioned the possibility of weight-loss drugs.

It pricked at me, but I tried to overlook it.

Everything in my system already says: Body is BAD.

Bad bad bad bad bad BAD.

Not everyone's body. Mine.

This body is bad. You have to change it. You have to cover it. You are too much and too big.

Those feelings flickered up, and I shut them down almost immediately. I could continue on my HRT journey. I could feel awake and alive again.

GOOD.

Until she followed up by email.

She warned me about the perils of visceral fat. She suggested I buy a HUME scale to monitor my body composition.

And all I heard was that I was a failure.

Here was a woman who had just listened to my story, who knew so little of my history with food or the long and complicated journey I'd taken to inhabit this body, and somehow I felt that she'd looked at me and decided I needed to be smaller.

I had come to her hoping to feel more alive. And suddenly, I felt myself being returned to a familiar and exhausting project: the improvement of my own body.

I've spent at least a decade healing my relationship with food. Learning to eat real meals, to nurture myself, to recognize what lands well in my body. I've spent a decade coming home to this body, allowing it to move and live and express itself. Learning to trust what I feel. My intuition. My bodily knowing.

I love to write and read and think, but above all, I am an embodied creature. I am not the giant head I seem to carry around on a physical form.

I am an animal, full of knowing.

And yet, almost immediately, I spiraled.

I fell headlong into an ancient wound, one I've spent so much of my adult life trying to tend to, understand, excavate, heal. A wound in which there is no ambiguity, no nuance, no room for the complicated and contradictory experience of being human. There is only BAD.

My body is bad. Too big. Too much. Evidence of some failure of discipline or restraint or worthiness. It doesn't matter how many years I've spent learning to nourish it, how many miles I've walked or danced, how many babies it's grown, how much pain it's endured, how much pleasure it's known. None of that seems to count once I've fallen into this place.

And suddenly I was thinking about weight-loss drugs all the time. Wondering whether I should take them, whether I wanted to take them, whether wanting to take them meant I'd betrayed some essential part of myself. Whether refusing them was an act of self-love or just another way of clinging to an identity I'd worked so hard to construct. Whether my hunger was something to honor or something to silence.

Good. Bad. Good. Bad.

There I was again.

I had walked into that lovely little office hoping to feel more alive in my body, and somehow emerged more preoccupied than ever with the question of whether my body was acceptable. I had wanted presence and found myself back in assessment. I had wanted attunement and found myself calculating, scrutinizing, negotiating with some imagined future version of myself who might finally be allowed to feel at home.

I know this place so well. I can make a project of almost anything. My health. My motherhood. My relationships. My spiritual practice. Even my capacity to surrender becomes something I can do well or badly.

I can turn healing into another standard against which I fail.

And I wonder how much of my life I've spent postponing the experience of actually living it. Imagining that if I can just get healthy enough, rested enough, thin enough, regulated enough, healed enough, I'll finally arrive at some state of uncomplicated presence. That I'll have resolved all the things that make inhabiting this body so difficult, and then I can get on with the business of living in it.

But the life itself has been happening all along.

The following week at school, I randomly pulled a picture book off my shelf to read to my friends. It’s called The Moon Is Going to Addy's House.

It's a simple book, almost entirely composed of these extraordinary, intricate collages. There are very few words. Two little girls and their family are driving home, and through the windows of their car, the moon follows them.

There it was again.

The same moon I'd driven alongside on the way home from Disneyland. The one that had accompanied me through all that longing and remembering, as I carried our sleeping children from one life to another.

And here I was, sitting with a group of preschoolers, turning the pages of a book I'd happened to pull off the shelf, watching the moon follow another little girl home.

I don't know that I need to make anything more of it. Maybe, for a moment, I can set down all the stories. The assessment. The endless sorting of experience into good and bad.

Maybe I can just nestle my hips into the late-summer dust beneath the eucalyptus trees and read a quiet book to some babies. One little hand resting on my shoulder. Another child sitting in my lap.

Touching me into presence.

I think I just want to look.

On coming home.

As I took in the expanse of the hills of western North Carolina—so lush and rolling and impossibly green—I began to sob uncontrollably.

I was driving to a regenerative land sanctuary, where my dear friend Val's fiancé was hosting a bluegrass concert in an old tobacco barn, and the next day, their wedding at the same site.

I hadn't seen Val in over six years, and hadn't spent more than a day or two in her presence in nearly twelve. For years we'd worked together at the same German restaurant in San Francisco, stumbling through our twenties with parallel stories of floundering, heartbreak, discovery, and reinvention.

When I saw her on the porch of her little home, surrounded by trees and lightning bugs and loved ones as a summer storm rolled through, I was struck by how at home she seemed in herself.

She was barefoot in tiny shorts and a crop top, gathering bowls of salad, ears of corn, and platters of grilled burgers, tucking them beneath the eaves as the rain came in. There was nothing performative about it. She moved with an ease that made everything around her feel cared for without ever seeming managed. She was equal parts wild woman and gentle nurturer, organized and maternal without losing any of the freedom I'd always associated with her.

Watching her, I had the strange feeling that I had known this version of her years before either of us had actually met her. It wasn't that she'd become someone different. She was still unmistakably Val. But somewhere along the way she'd nestled into herself. She seemed more completely herself than I had ever known her to be.

That image stayed with me as I drove through the mountains, crying for reasons I couldn't yet explain.

A surprising part of arriving on that side of the country after so many years away from Kentucky was how quickly scent reached something memory couldn't.

It was the smell of saturated earth. Warm rain. Air conditioning humming in old houses. The electric heaviness that settles before a thunderstorm. I can't quite describe it except to say it felt like some exchange of moisture between sky and body and earth. I hadn't realized how much I missed it.

It brought to me, viscerally, the memory of another porch. It belonged to the tiny, haggard house Nic and I first rented in Kentucky. The place was objectively disgusting when we moved in, and yet somehow we made the sweetest home there. People always wanted to come. We'd make biscuits and bacon gravy in the mornings and carry our plates outside to those cracked little concrete steps, drinking coffee and eating in the humid air while the neighborhood slowly came to life. We'd spend whole summer evenings out there, talking while thunderstorms rolled in.

The porch was hardly a porch at all, and yet it became the place where life happened.

Looking back now, it feels less like the entrance to a house than a foothold. A little anchor. The first place Nic and I learned to make a home together. We took so many of our maternity photos there— me in overalls, him in a polo shirt, both of us laughing, in love.

I love California with the deepest parts of my heart—its chaparral, its oaks, its dusty, woody greens—but this was something different. Looking out over endless miles of impossibly green forest, I felt something ancient in me awaken. My first instinct was to walk into the trees and disappear. Not in suffering, but in surrender. Not because I wanted to leave my life, but because I wanted, for just a moment, to stop carrying myself. To remind myself that I belong to the earth, and that at my simplest I would gladly be reabsorbed into it.

Whenever anyone asked how the trip was, I'd answer, "It's so green."

I don't think they understood that I wasn't just describing the landscape. I was describing relief, livelihood, connection, memory, timelessness. My body remembering something older than language.

There was a tumble of memory. Of the life I leapt into in Kentucky without looking. A life of tumultuous romance and creating homes and giving birth and beginning a journey that somehow became both healing and self-destruction through an obsession with health.

On the plane to North Carolina, I listened to a recording by a healer I deeply admire. At one point he guided everyone to imagine walking through a golden door and meeting a future version of themselves—someone more expanded, more healed, more evolved. I've met her before. She looks just like me, but softer.

We were invited to receive a message from this future self. I found myself craving something elaborate, some profound wisdom or secret pathway toward becoming her.

Instead, she gently pulled me to the ground. She rubbed my back. She stroked my hair. She covered the places that hurt with mud. She said only one thing: rest.

I kept waiting for more.

Rest.

I asked again.

Rest. Her voice a gentle hush. Not an admonition, but an insistence. Only rest.

The first full day I had in North Carolina was almost entirely my own. I drove out to the Laurel River, hiked for a mile or so, and settled onto a flat rock in the rushing water. I ate a sandwich and a peach, then I just lay there for hours. I didn't read or journal or meditate. I simply watched the sun appear and disappear behind fast-moving clouds and occasionally drifted to sleep.

I'd done almost exactly the same thing the week before while camping alone for a night at Paradise Road. I spent the day beside the river and the evening in a hammock watching the stars come out. Normally I would have read or hiked or made a nature mandala or written letters or journaled. Instead, I simply rested.

Something low and ancient in my body had already begun repeating the same message my future self gave me.

Rest.

For me, rest looks like no input. No conversation, no pondering, no processing, no learning, no doing. Just full surrender. The energetic equivalent of being reabsorbed into the trees.

I have been healing for so long. Learning. Optimizing. Changing. Growing. Researching. Fixing. I've been in transition for years. I've been becoming.

And something about this season, and this message, felt unmistakably clear: enough.

I am not done growing. I know I never will be. But I remember something from college: you can only study for so long before you have to stop and let your mind absorb what it's taken in. Integration is part of learning. Certainly it is part of healing, too.

Around the same time, another part of me was reaching its own limit. For years I've struggled with relentless digestive issues, eventually discovering that an overgrowth of bacteria in my small intestine was likely responsible for much of it. I had already completed one aggressive course of treatment and a hyper restrictive diet afterwards— which failed completely. My numbers were worse afterward than before.

So I tried again.

This time the protocol was even more aggressive. By the time I arrived in North Carolina, I was taking handfuls of antimicrobials every day and, quite frankly, shitting my brains out. It didn't feel like healing anymore. It felt like destruction. I know my body well enough now to distinguish catharsis from suffering. This wasn't some necessary purging. It was a fire that I kept feeding because everything we're fed says more effort equals more healing.

My naturopath suggested reducing the dose. Instead, I stopped. Rest, my body said.

A few days after I returned home, I saw a new acupuncturist. Without knowing anything about my visualization, my afternoon beside the river, or the message that had been echoing through my body for weeks, he kept returning to the same observation.

"You are healthy." My organs. My skin. My nervous system. My awareness. Again and again, he reflected health back to me. His strongest recommendation wasn't another supplement or another protocol. It was to stop most of what I was taking, keep only a couple of things for support, and begin telling myself that I am well.

For most of my life, I have believed the opposite.

I have felt broken, wounded, unwanted, unimportant, unlovable. I have treated myself accordingly. I have treated myself like something to fix, like a problem to be solved. I have worked incredibly hard to become well.

Rest.

I'm not done, but I'm done for now. I'm done optimizing, done striving, done fixing. I no longer need to fix my body or my mind. I need to nourish them. To add in instead of take away. To revel. To enjoy. To create space.

It isn't lost on me that this revelation arrived at the very same time we physically moved into a new home.

We now have twice the space we did before. My own bedroom. A little yard with a glorious pink trumpet tree we've named Sylvie. We've turned the couch toward the large picture window that frames her and jokingly call it our big screen TV, always tuned to the nature channel. The girls wake early and curl up with Babysitters Club books on the couch or in the hammock swing while I pad across the old painted vinyl floors making Dutch babies for breakfast.

Something about living here feels like an exhale.

After more than a decade of living in other people's homes, in other people's energy, collapsing beneath the intensity of other people's needs and chaos, I suddenly feel like I can fully inhabit my own space.

The first time Nic dropped the girls off here, he wandered through the house for a while before saying the house reminded him of Audubon. I laughed because he was exactly right. The painted floors. The little porch. The Dutch door opening onto the yard. The slightly crooked charm of a house that's lived many lives.

There was something I couldn't quite name in that moment— the person I'd built my first home with, standing in the threshold of this one, recognizing something in it before I had. And alongside it, something quieter, a pride I hadn't expected. Because this home is mine. Not ours, not borrowed, not shaped around someone else's life. Mine.

But I don't think it was really the architecture he recognized; it was the feeling. It's a collection of imperfect rooms that someone had loved into beauty.

And almost immediately I realized that's what I've been trying to do with myself. I have lived many lives. I am imperfect. I have been wounded. There are places that have broken open more than once. I've patched them and painted them. I've opened the windows and made another meal. I've Invited people in again.

Maybe that has always been the work. Not fixing, but making a home. Not becoming someone else, but learning to inhabit the person who is already here.

There will always be seasons of repair. Roofs to patch. Paint to refresh. Gardens to tend. Bodies asking for attention. But there are also seasons for reading on the porch.

The other afternoon the girls came home from camp, each grabbed a book, and headed straight outside. There's almost nothing out there yet besides our fairy garden and a strange wool rug covered in fish. They leaned against the wall beneath the front window where, in the middle of the day, the sun warms your legs but leaves your face in shade.

I felt that familiar urge toward productivity, but instead, I followed their lead. I lay down on the concrete beside them and opened my own book. Rest.

I've thought a lot about those tears that surprised me on the drive through North Carolina. At first I thought they were about nostalgia. Then I thought they were about Kentucky. Or Val. Or the smell of summer storms.

I don't think they were.

I think they were tears of recognition. Recognition of the young woman making a home on broken concrete steps in Kentucky, recognition of my dear friend becoming more fully herself over the course of twelve years, recognition of my own body remembering a landscape before my mind did, recognition that healing isn't always another protocol, another insight, another thing to fix, recognition that this radiant future self I’m longing to be is actually who I already am now. Sometimes it's inhabiting the life you've already built. Sometimes it's trusting that the home you've been searching for isn't waiting somewhere else.

It's waiting for you to finally come inside. Or perhaps to go outside. To settle, wherever you are.

I've spent so much of my life believing that wellness was something to earn, that belonging was something to achieve. If I could just heal enough, learn enough, work hard enough, change enough, become enough, then perhaps I would finally arrive.

But what that endless expanse of green trees shook my soul into remembering is that there is nothing to prove.

The trees aren't proving themselves. The river isn't proving itself. No one is angry at a seedling for being a seedling. It is simply doing what living things do.

I don't think we're meant to be any different. Healing isn't becoming someone else. It is learning to rest in exactly who I am, and perhaps who I have always been. Every version of me has been me. Every version has belonged.

Outside my window, as I write this, Sylvie bobs in the summer wind, framed by our big screen TV. She doesn't hurry herself toward bloom, or apologize for the ocean of dead leaves she's cast off. She simply responds to the life she's been given— at home in herself. And I am at home watching her. Everything in its place. Everything belonging. Maybe that is what rest actually is.

To Beth on her 42nd birthday

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.

On peace.

I've been talking to my aversive emotions. Most of them look like ghosts. Sadness looks like a bubbly cartoon ghost, drawing attention to the ways in which I betray myself. My exhaustion is just a little slip, a faint flicker, dejected because he's simply doing his job of continually asking me to slow down. My fear is a young girl, swaddled in a blanket.

But my anger is harder to see, harder to grasp. She's hidden somewhere. I can feel her buried in my organs, burrowed deep in my aching muscles. I can feel her energy simmering beneath the surface.

Anger is buried in a story that women are not allowed to be angry. And yet, she's female. I can feel it. She's primal. She's ancient.

I feel her explode when I get a message that I have to return to court to rehash child support for the second time.

When Nic and I initially separated, I didn't ask for anything. I didn't fight over our bed or the toaster. I left every single thing except my clothes and plants and poetry books in our house and simply asked for what was fair— half the time with our beautiful babies. I didn't want to extract anything from him. I just wanted out.

I can feel myself reaching toward virtuousness in that statement and maybe it's true. Maybe I'm trying to be good. Maybe I'm trying to seem better than him. Maybe I'm angry that, when he eventually moved out, he dumped every mug and old picture frame he didn't want on me, but I didn't argue for the scalloped baby blue mirror I bought for our home, the one he yelled at me for buying in the first place. I didn't ask for the fluffy white blanket my parents bought me one Christmas that still lies across his couch. I didn't want to argue. I didn't want more points of contention, more conflict. I wanted to be done. I wanted what I thought was peace.

Yes, I wanted to be virtuous. I am naming it here. The amount of restraint I exercised. The morality I believed I brought to the situation.

Three and a half years after we separated, after a conflict about education for our girls-- something I am willing to fight for— I filed for child support. Nic absolutely refused to entertain anything other than public school education, mostly because it would carry a financial obligation. I wanted to stop begging for emotional support and receive it financially instead. I wanted the freedom to find Melby a good therapist, to take the girls on adventures, to enrich their lives outside of school if I couldn't do it within the educational system itself.

Naturally, he was furious.

I went through child support services because it's impartial. It's a state calculator. Income versus income plus custody time and nothing emotional. It took many, many months and when they arrived at a number, he refused it. It is due process to do so, and so we went to court. That process incited a lawyer to rerun the numbers, which, comically, had him owing me more money than initially quoted. After a laborious back and forth, we agreed on some number vaguely in between those two numbers, with him refusing to pay arrears, as is standard.

The negotiation was exhausting. The commissioner we spoke with separately quite overtly named that Nic talked circuitously and endlessly. Still, somehow, we settled it.

The first hearing was online, which somehow made it even more surreal. We sat there for hours listening to the unraveling of other people's lives one after another after another. A slew of custody disputes, restraining orders, and financial squabbles. Grief spilling awkwardly through the screen.

I dreaded seeing Nic even there, flattened into a glowing rectangle on my computer. At one point, the commissioner offered to bring us into the same virtual room together and I refused. The thought of directly facing him felt unbearable to my nervous system then. I wasn't ready.

Yet again, I felt exhausted and sad. I wanted to feel triumphant. Relieved. Empowered. But instead, it all just seemed to peter out energetically. It felt like Nic wanted to extract as much emotional labor and pride from me as humanly possible. Like he needed to remain in control for as long as possible.

He makes three times as much money as me. I carry nearly all of the invisible labor for our children. I enroll them in extracurriculars, pay their field trip fees, volunteer in their classrooms and donate when teachers ask, plan birthday parties, find medical care, schedule appointments, get haircuts, help with science projects, sign up for conferences, and communicate with the school.

Virtuousness (yet again) aside, I am the mother of his children. However he feels about me, I carried our babies in my body and care for them half the time tangibly and emotionally, ceaselessly. How could he not want to care for us all? I feel like I'm begging to be seen. To have all my unseen labor acknowledged. To have someone say yes to me. I see you. You're working hard to love your children well.

For one month, it was settled.

Until yesterday, when I got notice that he had reopened the case. He's arguing to return to the lower amount that was initially stated. That is TWENTY SIX dollars less than he is paying now. Less than 0.1% of his monthly income. It is a latte and a piece of quiche. A third of a tank of gas. A power move. A stab at returning to some semblance of control. A way to continue manipulating and exhausting me.

My anger emerged then. I felt her flare. I felt her explode from every organ where pieces of her lie dormant, suppressed.

I am angry. My anger is ancient. She's female. She's primal. She's hot and passionate and, I'm just beginning to realize, she's justified.

I'm angry because I've been violated, emotionally abused, and manipulated for years. I have the wherewithal now to remove myself from situations like that when they appear in my life, but I have no choice but to engage with Nic because we have children together.

I certainly complain about him to my inner circle, but publicly shaming him has never been my style. He has his own stories. We all do. His story is that I cheated on him, abandoned our family, that I'm erratic and manipulative, that nothing was wrong with our love and I insisted on finding problems where none existed. I heard from people I didn't even know at our girls' school that I had been unfaithful. The horror of that deeply untrue rumor circulating made me feel physically sick and yet I was still quiet. I wanted to keep the peace and what good would it do, I thought, to defend myself?

I've spent so long trying to keep the peace that I've abandoned the part of myself that knows when peace is no longer peace at all, but silence, suppression, self-erasure. Anger bubbling beneath every hidden surface is not peace.

I'm angry. I'm so fucking angry.

I'm angry I have to have one more engagement about this whole fucking thing with him. I'm angry about the sap on my time and energy. I'm angry I chose him. I'm angry he's the father of my children. I'm angry I have to spend the rest of my life engaging with him. I'm angry for how long I didn't express my anger, how it ate my insides, churned my stomach, depleted my body. I’m angry at how I still fawn around him sometimes, how I still cower, how I still long for approval. I'm angry at myself for how long I ignored my very real sensations and experiences in the name of being good.

It's not peace. It was never peace.

And yet, I'm also not angry he's the father of my children because my babies are my babies and there is no other version of them I would want. I choose these girls. I choose this lifetime. Even this trajectory. I can feel the ways it is forcing me into deeper and deeper presence with myself.

Because he's not always ugly. He's warm and funny and deeply enjoyable until suddenly he isn't. The air changes. The ground disappears beneath me. There is no accounting for when it comes.

So I'm learning to stay with myself.

I got that notice and I felt like my whole body was being consumed by fire. I screamed in my car. I raged. I let it consume me for a moment. I needed to feel that heat instead of continually pushing it away.

And then I remembered what I always tell Bonnie when Mel insists on pushing her buttons: "Take your power back."

What she wants is a reaction, your energy feeding her longing for engagement. And the same is true for Nic. He feels his power over me waning. He is no longer my master. He can no longer tell me how to sleep or eat or speak or dress or move through the world. He cannot define me anymore.

I think that is part of what my anger is trying to say. Not destroy him. Not punish him. Not even escape him, because I can't. We are tethered together forever through these children we made and love beyond reason.

My anger is asking me to stop abandoning myself in the name of being good, to stop confusing silence with peace, to stop believing endurance is the highest form of womanhood.

Anger, I am realizing, is not the opposite of love. Sometimes it is love. Love for myself. Love for the small animal body that knew for years something was wrong while my mind kept trying to override it. It is love for my daughters, who are watching me closely and learning what a woman does when she is diminished. Whether she disappears or whether she remains. It is love for two young women, who are building their prototype for love, and I refuse to let it be what their father and I created.

My anger is ancient. She's female. And she is finally done confusing self-erasure for peace.

I don't want to disappear anymore.

This next hearing is in person.

Something in me understands that I need to walk into that room.

Not to fight him, not to perform strength, not to finally say the perfect thing that will make him understand what he has done to me. Just to stand inside myself while he is there. To let my body learn that I can survive being seen by him without abandoning myself in the process.

I think that is what taking my power back actually means. Not becoming hard, not becoming cruel, not winning. Just remaining fully here, fully mine. Even in the presence of someone who once made me forget I belonged to myself.

So I will go back to court. I will sit across from him again. I will feel the heat rise in my body and I will let it move through me instead of swallowing it whole. I will answer the emails. I will fill out the paperwork. I will continue building a life that is steady and joyful and deeply my own.

And then I will come home to my girls.

I will cut golden kiwi at the kitchen counter and listen to their stories and sign permission slips and braid hair and make snacks and keep becoming the woman I was always trying to save underneath all that silence. I will allow myself to be at peace.

On being awake.

Lately, I’ve been having nightmares. Most of the time I can’t remember the details, but when I feel into the memory in my body, they’re winding. They feel like webs, like cloaks — thick, heavy, layered. They weigh me down and then wake me up with a lurch.

Most nights I get up at least five times. Sometimes nine. It’s often more than every hour; I'm a newborn again, unable to link together my sleep cycles, lumbering through a staccato of disconnected horror reels. Then there are nights I stay awake for hours. Every part of me that feels anxious or sticky or resentful rises up and parades through my consciousness, demanding attention. I replay all that plagues me — all my resentments and pains. It’s a long, stressed line of people in a government building, waiting for their moment to deal with some painful but necessary piece of bureaucracy.

When I wake up exhausted in the morning, I try not to resent my mind. It’s calling attention to everything that needs to be seen. It’s saying: notice me.

I have a strong desire to take melatonin and force myself to sleep, but I know my body is asking for more than sedation. Less escape, more presence.

I’ve gotten to the point where I can no longer ignore it. The patterns I’ve lived with no longer work.

My resolution this year was to address my longstanding physical issues: a persistently painful gut, a dysregulated, weak menstrual cycle, almost constant, debilitating fatigue and brain fog. After rounds upon rounds of bloodwork, gut protocols, and the ever-glamorous pooping on a tray — and relentless reading, podcast-listening, and self-advocacy on my part — I learn through my naturopath that (theoretically) the root cause of so much of my agony has been an underfunctioning thyroid along with myriad pathogenic bacterial infections and a deluge of low-grade food allergies that slowly corroded and inflamed my intestinal lining.

The road to recovery has been more than non-linear. It’s been an exhausting, swirling scribble. I just want to feel good. I want to be better.

I’ve been on so many rounds of anti-microbials and supplements. I’ve done a low-FODMAP diet and then low-histamine diets. I’ve edited out corn, soy, wheat, dairy, sugar, legumes, peanuts, sesame, and eggs. I’ve eaten only homemade organic, whole, unprocessed foods. I’ve sat in front of the red light, meditated, written in my gratitude journal, grounded, been in bed at least eight hours a night, created boundaries with my phone, exercised, and breathworked. At last I’m on thyroid medication; after a lifetime of avoiding pharmaceuticals, I would do most anything. Everywhere I turn, there seems to be a suggestion that if I just did one more thing, I’d be better.

But somehow still, riding an e-bike with my boyfriend for an hour on a sunny day feels like completing an Ironman. Everything is draining. I feel like I’m carrying my own dead body through the mud most days — lugging a corroded sack of organs through the waste. I’m exhausted, fuzzy, cranky, and bloated. I don’t need a nap. I don’t need a good night’s sleep. I feel like I need to be in a coma for two years to catch up with whatever is happening — to climb myself out of the pile of emails and dishes and sibling arguments and constant self-flagellation that has somehow rendered one of the primary drivers for human wellness into giving up entirely.

My thyroid gave up because I pushed myself too damn hard for too damn long. Because I want to be good. Because I want to help everyone and do everything perfectly and not feel any of the weird, inconvenient things that come with being human. But now life seems to be insisting I feel it all. It's dredging up every unhealed part of me for that nighttime parade of processing.

One evening, I could feel it all simmering. After a year spent really attuning to my body, I felt her — the pressure, the pushing, the responsibilities, how it all stacked up. I could feel that if I didn’t let something move, I was going to snap. I told the girls I needed to cry. That it would probably be long and loud, but I was okay. That the tears weren’t about them, and they were safe, and I would stop eventually. Then I closed myself in our room and sobbed.

I heaved for at least thirty minutes, not about anything in particular — just pressure and sadness leaving the body. In these moments, I can picture the little girl in me. She's always at the base of an old oak tree, situated in a little nest I've made with a fluffy golden blanket. When I'm at peace, she rests. But much of the time, she's suffering. I feel her grieving loudly when I cry.

At one point, Melby brought me water and tissues. Bonnie asked if I wanted a hug. And then they both curled around me while I cried. Usually I hide my face when I cry. I’m embarrassed to be seen in my tears, but with my girls I could cry freely. I wasn’t afraid of being ugly to them. When it passed, they asked why I was so sad, and it felt very true and simple to say that there’s a very little girl in me who often feels like she’s not good enough.

There was something in that moment — the three of us looped together in my bed, my face blotchy and wet, their arms around me — that felt like the opposite of collapse. Something like permission. Something like being allowed to be a person instead of a performance.

As I’ve leaned into that permission, I find myself falling apart more often. Just today I crumpled and cried again. I cried with my face in my stupid dirty rug, convinced that crying would make me feel better — release some of this garbage I’m carrying around as a personality — until I felt it tighten in my chest. It felt like an orb, and the more I wanted to push it through me, the tighter and worse it felt.

And just then something I’ve set as an intention in ceremonies many times, but rarely bring into my everyday life,  came screeching back: my work is to not rush toward or away from anything.

Don’t push away the pain, don’t avoid it, don’t suppress it, don’t fear it. But also don’t reach for it, don’t clamor to feel it all at once, don’t insist it means something, don’t grasp it. Just let it be. Let that ball of wobbly, tight, wounded energy in the chest be just that. Let it radiate there for a moment. Just be with it.

I got up from my sobbing and reclined on the couch. I put my hand on the orb and then asked José to do the same. I breathed. It didn’t go away. It just loosened. I felt that pain — the pain of trying so hard, this year and always, and still suffering so much. The pain of my body not reflecting the immense amount of effort I put into her well-being, that somehow my gut just won’t work and my body’s still limp and drained and most everywhere I go I’m the biggest person in the room and somehow that’s bad and it all feels like a punishment. I heard a voice that said, “Let it be a path to greater gentleness.”

In a world obsessed with GLP-1s and injectables, a world that wants to edit our biology, shrink us, paralyze us, squeeze us into some kind of perceived perfection, I’m standing on the other side saying: I’m going to feel this all. I’m going to feel the exhaustion I’ve heaped upon myself for decades. I’m going to feel all the places I don’t have healthy boundaries, where I abandon myself to maintain some level of comfort. I’m going to feel my speed, my constant urging toward perfection — and how unachievable it is for anyone. I’m going to feel my discomfort, my impatience, my longing. I’m going to put my hand on my heart and breathe.

I’m also going to give up thinking that if I breathe and allow and cry and stay present, anything will change. That then I’ll be good. Because there’s still pressure there. Instead, I’ll be gentle.

I think what I’m learning is this: healing can become another performance. Another way to prove my worth. Another ladder to climb. Even the desire to “get better” carries the implication that who I am now is not enough. For so long I thought healing meant movement, effort, progress. But maybe healing isn’t something I do. Maybe it’s something I stop doing. Maybe the work right now isn’t to become better, but to finally allow myself to just be — tired, imperfect, cranky, lumpy human — without demanding anything more.

I'm going to just spend the rest of my life breathing, doing this one simple thing so necessary for existence. In and out, in and out, with whatever comes. Not rushing towards or away from any of it. 

And maybe the nightmares will keep coming. Maybe I’ll keep waking up startled, pulled from whatever dark narrative my mind is spinning in the night. But I think there’s space now — to meet the fear inside those dreams the same way I meet the fear inside my body. To notice it. To breathe. To feel the heaviness without trying to escape it or decode it or fix it.

Maybe the point isn’t to stop waking up.

Maybe the point is to be awake.

Home.

For as long as I can remember, my dreams have been heavy with the same recurring nightmare. I move into an old house that’s too big— a terrifying maze of rooms, secret doors, endless adjoining spaces, gaping living rooms, an Escher entanglement of staircases. Most notably, it is piled high with other people’s things. Sometimes I am crawling through the inner workings of the walls, sometimes sifting through heaps of objects in horror. Occasionally the house is flooding from the bottom up as I trail up endless swirls of stairs desperate to escape. Whatever the theme, the feeling is always the same—a haunting, relentless overwhelm.

One day, I realize the simple truth—these houses reflect my internal world. They are the baggage I carry, the way I make my home in others’ stuff and become lost in what is not mine. I get so mired in the details I never step back to notice that none of it was mine to pick up in the first place. It feels laughably obvious.

And for once, I commit to building my own home instead of living in someone else’s.

In waking life, I dive into my internal world, and it is full of pain. These past four years have been a reckoning—learning to trust, love, and listen to myself the way I’ve so longed for from someone else. I have gutted myself, emotionally and physically—a complete remodel, a demolition, the enormity of it only clear once I was already too deep to turn back. I am constantly exhausted. I wake up tired in my bones and no amount of sleep is ever enough, as I muck through the heaviness I amassed as some sort of deranged dowry.

Last night, a new version of the dream came. I am in a big house, but this one feels different, softer. It is full of things, but this time they are organized and clean, and I can feel fresh air in the hallways. There are relics of times past—a wall nook for an old phone, a built-in port for a vacuum—echoes of ancient times that are also endearing, like the sweet scars of childhood bumps and bruises. One corner of the house holds a collection of the girls’ little sparkling birthday headbands that Nic saved, sprinkles of glitter stars and birthday numerals flopping over their worn bands. Normally I’m not sentimental; I’m often overwhelmed by clutter, but these tethers to our collective past warm my heart. I feel at peace in this home, settled. And even in the depths of my sleep, I can feel the ghost of all the dreams before this one, the contrast of that lost and haunting longing. I feel such gratitude to be here, to be home, finally.

I am walking through some floor of the house, when there’s a sudden surge of people. Deeply surprised, I insist they leave, despite their protestations. Panic rises as I push them toward the door, but more and more people are pouring in. They are having a party in my sweet little sanctuary, and it’s then that I realize:

I left the front door open.

I wake up with that horror. And yet this time, unlike my usual nightmare, I recognize something new. I have built a home in myself. I have my own crevices and corners, my own memories and mementos. I know who I am, how I feel, what I need. At this point, the question is only how faithfully I listen, how close I stay to the pulse of my own knowing. And this dream shows me clearly: I need to close the front door.

I feel this truth every day. In my relationship with social media. In people’s opinions about my choices. In the constant stream of advice and input. I told my love the other day: this year is teaching me, intently and relentlessly, about my boundaries, and the only person ever truly violating them is me.

I look at my phone too late, answer emails and texts too quickly, make myself too available, spiral through the horror of the news, offer up the intimate details of my life as if I want feedback when I don’t. One night recently, instead of turning off my phone at 7 as I had been doing, I go on a deep dive on Instagram. I scroll women and communities adjacent to my own. I judge, I compare, and underneath it all is the fear that the way I live is wrong. And if I am wrong, then I cannot exist. I sleep fitfully.

I am leaving the front door wide open, and the sanctuary I’ve worked so hard to build becomes overrun by the chaos of the outside world. It is a choice. But this time there’s no radical overhaul required, no gutting, no revolution. I just need to close the front door. Close the door.

Keep what is mine. Drop what is not. Keep what’s good, drop what doesn’t. Close the door.

The morning after this dream, we’re walking to school and Bonnie tells me she has a tool in her brain. The tool, she says, allows her to keep her good dreams, throw away her bad ones, and even replay the ones she really likes. “It keeps my brain happy, mama,” she says, adding that she worked really hard to build it.

And I feel this. I feel it in my bones, how Bonnie sort of floats and laughs through life. She says she likes climbing trees, listening to music, dancing, and “bow and arrowing.” She likes to have a laugh, flicker through a chapter book, or lounge on the couch. She doesn’t hold a grudge, she wakes up slow but happy most days, she eats only when she’s hungry and sleeps when she’s tired. I truly believe it’s because she built a tool in her brain to keep what’s good and throw away the rest.

My tool is a closed door. It’s the absence of an invitation. An acknowledgment that so much swirls around me, but I will preserve space for what is only mine. It’s quiet. It’s letting go of all the heaviness, all the things I stored for so long. It is a polite refusal to participate in the onslaught of opinions, information, and input all around me.

It is relishing my inner sanctuary. I have worked so hard to build it, and now it is time to rest in the peace and magic and calm of my own inner world. To drop in and read a book, sip some tea by the light of a salt lamp, cuddle in my cozy blankets, exhale, relax. I have my space, I have my tool, I can keep what is mine and drop the rest.

At last, I am finally home.

To beth on her 41st birthday

Every year I write something for my birthday. It stands as a little marker in time—a cairn along the trail of life.

Here you are. You're going the right way.

Whatever that means.

This year, each time I began to write, it felt ever so slightly wrong. It felt like I was trying to be impressive, wise, humorous. It felt effortful. Every little stack of rocks I attempted kept tumbling. Each collection of words felt like a caricature—a self-portrait painted from the outside in, a mask.

Recently, I keep thinking about masks. Personas.

A teacher I’ve been following recently quoted Jung in his new book: “The persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual."

Who am I? Why am I here?

It seems a great deal of our time on earth is spent in pursuit of answers to those questions. Each birthday, I write a version of an answer. Something humble, grateful, transitional. Something raw. But this year, none of it felt right. It all felt like a story I was trying to hold—too tightly.

Increasingly, the universe keeps inviting me to let go of the question entirely. Answering the question keeps me stuck, identified, in pain. Every corner I turn suggests I look at the mask and it feels ever more true that even the version of myself I am sharing as “authentic” is, in itself, also a mask. A persona of vulnerability, passion, and struggle. A story about my story.

Sam Harris, in his daily meditations, often invites the listener to turn attention on itself. Who is meditating, right now? Who is the one asking who you are? What stands outside the question itself to ask the question?

Whenever I’m invited into that space, I see a swan. I’m wearing it like a suit. It pulls off of me, beak-first, rising smoothly into the sky. The silliest and most true way to describe it: like slipping the skin off a garbanzo bean— a swift pop revealing a layer not previously visible. The swan peels off, then dives through my chest and explodes out the back of me. What remains is the cosmos. I am no longer, but the stars are.

Long after this initially happened, I look up swan in my spirit animal book. It says: "In Sanskrit, the name for Swan is hamsa and the word for an enlightened being is paramahamsa (supreme Swan). Sages say that by swimming in the waters of the mind for a lifetime, Swan absorbs the wisdom of the lotus blossom—releasing identification with the ego and merging with the cosmos."

Yes. YES.

The swan is a cairn. You're going the right way. Except there is no right. No way. No you. There is only releasing all of that and returning to the stars.

A few weeks before I turn 41, I stop wearing mascara.

It feels almost too absurd a thing to note, but for me, it represents a significant transition—a letting go. On my 12th birthday, I asked to go to the Clinique counter for a makeover. They put products on my face that seemed to enhance what I had always thought was inadequate. For almost three decades, washing my face at night felt like scrubbing away something essential. The mask felt like the most authentic version of me, because it was closer to who I wanted to be.

I stopped wearing mascara because I felt an increasing urge to cry at random times—and the vanity of not wanting muddy streaks on my face had stopped me. After wearing this mask for the majority of my life, I gave it up. I felt sure people would recoil at my bare face, that I looked too tired, too old, too squinty.

No one seemed to care. Or they did but they didn’t name it and that released me from caring, too.

As I anticipated, I cried often and intensely. I closed myself in the closet under the stairs and sobbed out of exhaustion, frustration, fear, excitement—or often just sheer relief. I cried because I am the swan who is not a swan but a portal to infinity, because all the holding on was tiring and giving it up is both terrifying and liberating. I cried because I am wobbling through transition— for years it was getting to know myself, and now it is freeing myself from the constraints of any definition of self.

It is slow. The ego fights hard. After I released myself from the horror of exposing my bare skin, I found myself expecting the pendulum to swing in the opposite direction—that I’d experience a revolution and learn to love my natural face. That I’d celebrate my lines, my lack of definition, my splotches!

None of it happened. I didn’t wake up one day, affirming myself like an Instagram model, shouting my love for my God-given form in all its glory.

But one day in a hot yoga class, I caught my reflection in the mirror and felt—impartial. I felt love and disdain violently collide and how neutrality lay in the remains of that implosion. I saw my squinty eyes, my lopsided face, my frizzy hair, my belly— round from babies and cortisol. I saw my strong movements and the joy at the corner of my eyes and my center of gravity which is low and steady—a tree. I saw the good and the bad, the ugly and the beautiful; I saw the labels we hold dear, the constant judgments, the trap of identification, and all those heavy determinations somehow gathered together to make a net zero. It was an endless stack of rocks— an impossibly high cairn— that when weighed at the scales amounted to nothing. They were emptiness itself. None of it mattered.

I'm not beautiful and I'm not ugly. I'm not good and I'm not bad. I'm not even I.

Again and again and again and again, Mary Oliver’s words come to me, “You do not have to be good.” It is an anthem, vibrating through the universe, returning to me always.

You do not have to be good. You do not have to be good.

The idea that you ever might be, the striving, keeps me trapped.

Answering the questions posed by the human mind keeps me trapped.

Outside of that lies the stars.

And yet, here I am often, wrapped in my imperfect skin, just stacking rocks. Creating stories, getting trapped beneath them, letting them tumble. Another cairn. Another year. Another story.

You’re going the right way. There’s nowhere to go. We are all just stars.

To the little girl.

A healer I work with occasionally asked me to address my inner child as “my little girl.” It’s softer, she said. More familiar.

By now, many of us understand the concept of the inner child—the part of us that holds old wounds, shapes how we move through the world, determines the love and validation we seek, and the gaps we try to fill. Tending to the unmet needs of that child is often the portal to the deepest kind of healing we can experience as adults.

My work is alongside children in the formation of those very wounds. My hope is to soften them—to create space for self-awareness and integration, rather than empty chasms sealed off by time and pain. No one moves through childhood without wounds; it’s impossible. They are no one’s fault. They are simply a byproduct of leaving the flawless plenitude of the womb and entering a world full of humans, each carrying their own stories and pain.

I think of this often at school. What stories are these children already beginning to carry? How do they see themselves? What needs are they asking to be met—especially through behaviors that appear disruptive or clingy? How can we help them grow emotional literacy and tools to navigate the hard things—not to avoid them, but to make sense of them? How can we honor who they are and how they exist in the world?

Essentially, how do we raise children who know themselves well enough that, when the sticky parts arise, they can meet those parts with love, compassion, and gentleness? So those parts become portals to their healing, too.

This idea of the inner child—my little girl in particular—has been heavy on my mind since last weekend. I canceled our camping trip at the last minute, following what felt like a wave of negative feedback on Friday. In truth, I may have latched onto that feedback to justify something I didn’t want to admit: that I was already mentally and physically depleted. That the idea of hauling gear into the woods to set up camp in the mud—especially as a single parent—felt like more than I could manage. Especially when my own girls are less than resilient in inclement weather these days.

There was also the familiar weight of feeling responsible for everyone’s experience, mixed with the disappointment of not being able to control the weather when I’d dreamed of a sunny weekend romping in the creek. And the potluck was unraveling—several families who’d signed up to bring food were waffling on coming at all.

None of it was huge on its own, but together it became heavy. The task of making a group decision while feeling unclear and overwhelmed tipped me over the edge, and canceling the trip felt like the simplest, most relieving choice. I had talked with the teachers, received their support, and felt good about my decision…

Until family after family messaged me to ask if they could still go. A deluge of texts reactivated all the anxiety I’d tried to quiet. Of course, I should have expected this. I wanted people to camp if they wanted to—I just didn’t want to feel responsible for it. And I didn’t want to go myself.

That’s a hard thing to admit when you’ve built your life and work around being a physically and emotionally resilient outdoor wanderer.

By Saturday afternoon, the messages kept coming. I found myself obsessively checking the weather, hoping for a downpour that would justify my decision, make me feel less guilty—less like I’d failed the community. But the skies cleared after a heavy morning rain. Families went out. More messages came. And I spiraled.

A friend offered reassurance: You made the best decision you could. It’s okay to choose rest. They were all things I knew to be true, and yet, none of them soothed me.

Because the part of me that was activated wasn’t rational. She was young. Tender. Emotional. She was the version of me who cried when she got 99% on a test because it wasn’t perfect. The one terrified of disappointing anyone, even a little, as if it meant she wasn’t allowed to exist. She felt responsible for other people’s happiness. And each message that hinted someone might be disappointed sent her into panic.

She didn’t need to be reassured she wasn’t wrong. She needed to feel the fear of being wrong—and let it move through her.

So I went into my closet and cried. For a long time.

Despite being a seemingly emotive person, crying is hard for me. I struggle to let go of control long enough to fully feel. I don’t want to make too much noise or disrupt anyone. I don’t want to be seen in my pain. But the closet under the stairs, dark and small, became a cocoon—safe enough to let the tears come. To give my little girl the space she needed. I howled and heaved and offered that girl just what she needed— my full attention, my willingness to sit with her, even in her fear that she was wrong, my love, my time. It wasn’t conditional; it was me showing up fully to be with her in that experience.

I still felt sensitive afterward, but I also felt settled, clearer.

As I sat with these feelings in my closet sanctuary, I found myself thinking about my own children—especially my eldest daughter—and how our most challenging relationships often become our greatest teachers. I kept thinking about the suggestion to call the inner child my little girl. I thought about my own little girls—my babies. Specifically Melby, who already seems to carry her own imprint of perfectionism and anxiety, intensity and fear.

Another thing that’s hard to admit as an educator—someone who has built a life around working with young children—is that my own children trigger the hell out of me. Especially Melby. She is a mirror of me in so many ways, and sometimes it’s so painful to look at that reflection.

And yet: she, too, is a portal to my healing. She is my little girl. A reflection of the wounded one inside me, and a living embodiment I can now love and tend and nurture into something more whole than I once was. When those more challenging parts show up in her—most often in direct reflection of ways in which I struggle too—how can I meet her with supreme kindness?

How can I say to her not that 99% is enough, but that even 1% is enough, as long as she is showing up fully as herself? That all I ask is authenticity. There is nothing to prove. I don’t want to convince her she’s enough; I want to assure her that being herself is all that’s required.

I want to repeat it again and again until she feels it in her bones and it ripples back through time, through her previously unborn body, into the little girl within me—so I feel it, too.

Being yourself is all that’s required.

As the year comes to a close, my deepest hope is that you’ve felt that here. That your children have felt seen and welcome, just as you are. That you have, as well.

On a walk shortly after my tears, Mary Oliver’s words came to me again, as they so often do: “You do not have to be good/ You do not have to walk on your knees/ For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting,/ You only have to let the soft animal of your body/ love what it loves.”

You do not have to be good.

The further I go on the journey of forest school, the clearer and more simple it all becomes: our work is simply to be ourselves—and, as educators, to create an environment in which it’s simplest for children to do just that. When we know ourselves, we can love. We can learn. We can grow. We can create boundaries. We can expand and stretch and connect and become.

Everything else is extra.

For all of your selves, for all of the comfort and discomfort and learning of this space, for this beautiful year together, for our animal bodies ever reminding us where we came from, for all the little ones—both those at school and those inside you, dear readers—I am so deeply grateful. Thank you, thank you.

On modern love.

One of my favorite poets/ contemporary authors, Joy Sullivan, offered a prompt to write about modern romance— any twist that felt appropriate. This piece is what came forth. It sits in clear contrast to my previous post, where I wrote about parting ways with this same person. And yet—here we are. Life is brief and blooming and strange. I won’t apologize for following joy when it calls, or for the occasional birdlike nature of my own heart—ever flitting about.

When I left the cocoon of my childhood home for college, I made a promise to myself: I wouldn’t touch alcohol in this lifetime—or a man's penis until I was married. Sobriety and virginity felt deeply important, shaped by the conservative values my parents had instilled in me.

Two decades later, I found myself unmarried, in a toxic relationship that had nonetheless gifted me two beautiful children, and regularly drinking too much to escape the ways I had learned to gaslight myself. I justified staying in a life that felt completely out of alignment, clinging to the belief that somehow, it was all my fault.

This year marks three years since I began choosing clarity. I started by quitting drinking, and then, in quick succession, I left my marriage. We had gotten married in what, in hindsight, was a last-ditch effort to salvage a relationship already beyond repair.

Leaving was monumental—especially after a lifetime of fawning over men. For as long as I can remember, I believed my worth was tethered to the approval and adoration of the opposite sex. In my twenties, I threw myself at the feet of men, hoping for praise, allowing them to touch me in ways that degraded and devalued me. Sometimes, they took what they wanted despite my protests. My now-ex-husband was one of the first to commit his attention and energy to me, and somehow, that—along with an adorable man-bun—blinded me to the ugliness beneath the surface of our “playfulness.”

After the birth of my two girls, something inside me began to shift. Every choice I made grew sharper, clearer. Instead of fumbling through life with a wobbly compass, I could now ask myself: Would I be proud to have my children repeat this choice? Could I explain it to them? Would it bring me joy to see them live in a similar way? This was its own kind of romance—pure, searingly clear.

When I asked myself if I’d be proud for them to emulate the relationship I had with their father, the answer was painfully obvious: no. This was not the version of love I wanted to model for my daughters.

After our separation, I embarked on a painful, radical journey of self-love. I began dating myself—not in the cocktails-and-roses kind of way I once imagined, but in the quiet, daily act of choosing myself over the comfort of old habits. I fumbled through therapy, medicine-work, solitude, journaling, meditation, inner-child work, Shamanic journeying. I cried. I cried so many tears I had once pressed beneath a heavy veneer of rage. I became softer.

Much of this work happened in a literal closet under the stairs—my own self-imposed Harry Potter quarters. I’d transformed that little story space in our tiny one-bedroom house into a little fairy nook for my girls, but also, for me, a sacred refuge for writing and journeying, praying and sobbing.

As a counterpoint to this quiet personal revolution, one of the most joyful—and still terrifying—parts of my unraveling has been learning to open, even just a little, in the presence of others. For a long time, I stood on the sidelines of ecstatic dance, both drawn to it and scared of what it might unlock. The idea of moving freely, without pretense, felt too vulnerable. Too naked. But eventually, I showed up. And then I kept showing up. Slowly, something in me began to thaw.

On that dance floor, I started to feel the edges of my aliveness again—not just the pain, but the joy, too. I let my body lead for once, not my fear or my mind. I showed up in presence, and motion, and feeling. And somewhere in that authenticity, I met a man—ten years my junior—who is now my boyfriend.

It’s not what I expected from this chapter of my life, or from my first real relationship post-marriage. Someone so young, so clearly in a different place in life. And yet, here he is: evolved, tender, gentle, receptive, and abundantly kind—so much my ex was not.

I don’t expect to be with him forever. He wants to travel, to have his own children, to live so much of the life I already lived prior to meeting him. And that’s part of what makes it so beautiful. For the first time in my life, I’m in a relationship where I don’t need anything from the other person. My biological clock isn't ticking. I’m not looking for financial support or a roommate to split the bills. I’m here for presence, for touch, for connection. There’s a deep freedom in loving without expectation or timeline.

He meets me in my softness. He listens. He sees me. He witnesses the daily things I’ve long called ugly and names the beauty in them. He has become a mirror for the goodness I so long prayed to find in someone else—only he’s shown it to me in myself. Loving him has become a portal into loving me.

This lifetime, I expect my greatest love story to be the one I create with myself, and other relationships have been a vehicle to developing that love. My ex-husband taught me to love myself by forcing me to advocate for myself—fiercely, even through discomfort and lies. My daughters taught me to love myself by clarifying my values and desires. And this man has taught me to love myself by loving me exactly as I am. Not a version of me, but the whole messy, wild, unfolding bundle I am becoming.

And our impermanence has allowed me to hold that lightly—not as an attachment to him, but as a gift to myself.

On one of my journeys, it came to me in this language: he is a delivery of love from the universe. Not one I’m meant to keep or cling to or ask anything of—not praise, not permanence, not a hand in marriage. He is love made manifest. And like all sacred gifts, he’s meant to be felt, embodied, and then released into the wind— to curl around other women in the breeze as they dance beachside, perhaps reeling, too, from their own journey of self-discovery.

This is the shape of modern romance, at least for me: not a contract, not a destination, not a cure, but a container for presence, a practice in being with what is, a celebration of love for love’s sake—without needing it to last forever to mean something. And in this wild, fleeting, luminous chapter, I am in love, not just with him, but with the way love has taught me to belong to myself.

The starling and the tree.

At 40, I realized—I am a tree.

The realization came powerfully during a journey. My body transformed—roots stretching from my seat, branches unfurling from my crown, my trunk strong and steady. My treeness carried neither ecstasy nor grief, passion nor pain—only perfect equanimity.

My mind kept searching for problems, for questions demanding answers. But none arose. That human desperation for knowing flickered at the edges of my roots and limbs, but it never touched me.

I was grounded. I was peace. There was no need for answers because everything just was, without effort. I kept hearing this line: "From now on, whatever is meant for me will walk right up to me."

That very day, a beloved and necessary teacher walked right up to me. For so long, I had searched—desperate for partnership, for love. And then, unexpectedly, it arrived. The evening of that journey, he came to my house. We talked for eight hours, made love until the morning, and then, with that same intensity and fervor, spent two months inseparable, tangled into each other. He is ten years my junior, inexperienced in many ways, and the most absolute beam of pure living light.

Our love felt like teenage love—unafraid, unguarded. No games, no wounds pulling the strings. Just radiant love propelled by the simple longing to bask in each other’s light. A tumble of mutual generosity, compassion, silliness, sweetness, desire. I felt safe. Seen. Held. We danced, hiked, cooked, kissed, laughed, and talked for hours, wrapped in our little world. It was a gift—an unguarded lesson in love. In our short time together, I processed an incredible amount of pain from my marriage, deeply defined my desires and boundaries in relationship, and experienced my calcified heart absolutely cracking open.

On another journey, I learn he is a starling—fluttering, restless, expansive, ever in motion. He was born to roam. I provide nurturance and shelter. He can spread my seeds, generating new life. We serve each other on a fundamental level but are not meant to be together for a lifetime. He could rest in my branches, but he could never root beside me.

And so, there was pain, too. I often felt our differences. In the vortex of my house, where we spent so much time cocooning in a little bubble of love, we were in perfect, endless harmony. But as soon as we entered the world, there was the pain of disconnect. In each other's communities, I felt the misalignment, of mismatched perspectives and direction. I felt his flittering, his longing gaze. Even when he stayed anchored with me, I could feel his desire to fly. It is innate to his being. 

As always, I put him before myself. I tried to fly for him. But I am no starling. I am a tree. The hardest truth: I didn’t want to change him, but I needed something he could never be.

Last night, I let him go. I had done so earlier in the week on the heels of a glaring example of our disconnection, but that time it was tinged with anger. A week of drifting back to and around each other still returned me to the searing clarity that our romantic relationship no longer serves me. Every superficial fiber of my being wants that to be untrue. I want to keep going. I want to keep playing and loving. I want to keep being fed and held. But my inner knowing is abundantly clear that our romance has run its swift and powerful course. 

Part of truly loving myself is trusting that knowing, even when it seems to wound me in the short term. That knowing has been waiting a lifetime to be heard. She has been there, sometimes whispering, sometimes yelling, but always available. 

And in truth, I realized the love I am longing for is not from some man; it is not even from the most rooted, grounded man. It is not from any man. It is from myself. It is connecting with that voice and listening to her, believing her, cherishing her, following her. My starling reminded me how easy I am to love and now it is my work to give it to myself. 

In parting, I wrote him a love letter about how he has healed me. I have written quite a few love letters to men over the years, and now, with this newfound clarity and purpose of falling in love with Beth, it is time I write one to myself, too.

Sweet Beth, 

You are a tree.

You are steady and strong. You are nurturing and magical. People come to you for comfort, respite, play, shelter, anchoring. Something in you is ancient; it has been growing over centuries and lifetimes. It is connected to the earth, it is wise, it is a conduit for truth and grounding, it is loving in the most quiet, stable way.

What is meant for you will walk right up to you. There is no need to search, strive, or effort. You have everything you need and everything you need will continue to be provided to you without effort. Wait. Always wait.

Whenever you feel alone, reach down through your roots and feel how you are connected to every living thing below the surface, reach up and feel how you are also part of the sky. You are connected. You are alive. 

You are worth loving. You can be slow. You don't need any answers, any proof, any permission or reasons. You don't need to earn anything. You can wait. You are safe.

Your steadiness is a gift to the world. Your breath gives breath to others. You are a place of repose and peace. You are whole, you are abundant, you are generous, you are powerful, you are love. 

You are a tree.

All you have to do this lifetime is be a tree. Be. Wait. Love.

May you spend each day inspired by your own sturdiness as you expand quietly through time, ring by ring, year by year, out into this glorious world. I love you. 

I love you,

Beth

On purpose.

Why am I here and in service to what? What is wanting to live through me in this world?

I'm hungrily taking in this podcast Mark recommended, two and a half hours of content seemingly gathered and presented exclusively for me. These are the questions Jungian psychoanalyst and author, James Hollis repeats in various iterations, saying we must ask ourselves such things if we want to live our lives not just with purpose, but with fulfillment and joy. He speaks to the stimulus-response cycle in which so many of us become entrapped, the hell of our unconscious patterns, the deep loneliness of an unlived life.

Why am I here? 

When I allow my gaze to be too hazy, sometimes the answer to that question starts to leak. It drifts in many directions, following rivulets branching off from the strong current of my life. Before I know it, those little streams have dried up and I find myself lost. Why am I here? How did I get here?

This permeability has often been my challenge in life. I morph. I shapeshift. I meander and wander. In some ways, it's a gift. I find myself able to relate to most people; it is easy for me to make connections, understand others' points of view, feel what's beneath the surface. I also, too often, find myself then identifying too much with the parts that feel resonant and then also absorbing ways of being in the world that are not truly my own. I end up confused and drained.

My marriage was one long tributary I followed, refusing to stop long enough to realize I had set out on the wrong path. It was the ultimate example of deviation from self; I followed something too far that only kind of fit. Extricating myself from that relationship has encouraged me to know and see myself the most deeply I ever have, even, especially, when it is painful.

Conversely, at this point in my life, I'm learning to release the desperate cling to identification of any kind. I long to identify, name, articulate, encapsulate, define the world around me; I also recognize not just the futility and constriction of such, but the falsity of it. Self is an illusion. We are all part of an inextricable whole. The snake was always a garden hose. 

I can increasingly live in this emptiness, this interconnectedness, and I can recognize that there is a particular frequency to my humanness this lifetime that I am meant to embody. And that trying to deviate from it quite literally makes me sick. It feels like an incurable loneliness to live a life other than the one that is mine.

And so I return to the question, why am I here?

I've known some glimmer of it since the earliest days of my struggles. I was once 19, seeing Horacio Miller for therapy while attending UC Berkeley for undergrad. He was an older man from Argentina; I remember him as always in glasses with a newsboy cap. He communicated often through poetry, which resonated with me even then. I'd ride the 18 bus to Solano Avenue to sit in his small office near the Safeway where Emma and I would buy endless sandwiches and Wyder's pear ciders. When I was with Horacio, I'd wring my hands, bite my nails, and scribble endless fraught words in my journal--rescued kernels of clarity to carry with me out into the muddy world.

I was objectively depressed and diagnosed as such, but hindsight illustrates clearly that I just didn't know myself and that that distance from self filled my life with a haunting loneliness, an endless desperate search from some thing I craved, which, unbeknownst to me, was the woman herself on that very search.

I think about Horacio now, because he asked me a question that has stuck with me more than two decades later. I came to him, wet. I came to him in the murkiness of other people's opinions, their styles, their mindsets, their stories. Everywhere I went, I tried on a bit of what I found. I carried it all with me. It became heavy and confusing. I became lost. I was a hippie, retro, vintage, goth, emo, straight-edge, drunk, liberal, religious, agnostic, good girl/ rebel/ intellectual/ slut/ prude. There was no self. There was too much self. I was lost.

I admitted to Horacio I didn't know who I was. I was a different person everywhere I went. I was an endlessly absorbent sponge. I was exhausted.

He asked me, What's true about you no matter where you go?

Maybe it is just decades of memories of memories, but I feel like I can remember that question, because at that moment I arrived. Someone invited me in-- me, independent of all the parasites I willingly took on. And I had an answer, my own answer. I said that I loved being with children. I felt good, clearest, most like myself when I was with kids.

That has been true about me my whole life. It was true when I said I wanted to be a teacher at 5, when I started babysitting at 11, when I volunteered my time at summer camps at 12, when I nannied throughout my 20s, when I pursued an ECE degree at 25, when I taught for preschool for years, when I had my own children, when I opened my own school. My own moral and emotional barometer sometimes feel murky, but when I ask myself if I'd be proud to share my way of being in the world with a child, if I could explain it, encourage it, rationalize it, give it heart and life and love through the eyes of a child, that is my clearest truth. My most radiant self is evident absolutely through the lens of a child. Nothing makes more sense to me.

Why am I here and in service to what?

I am here in service to childhood. Not just for children, but for adults as well. I am here in service to play, to ease, authenticity, joy, simplicity. I am here in service to community. I am here in service to love. I am here in service to nature as a vehicle to remembering our own true nature. I am here to as radically and totally live my own life as an invitation to others to do the same-- to strip the pretense, the labels, the identification, the limitations, the fear, the projections, the stories, the constrictions and just be. To shift out of so effortfully doing life into simply being alive. Childhood is the natural embodiment of that all. It is liberation. It is expansive thought, endless creativity and curiosity, open-heartedness, energy, joy, natural connection, fearlessness, and radiant love. I am here in service to childhood.

I am not a teacher. I am in service to love. I am here in service to love.

I feel so absolutely clear on that. It's been true since I was depressed at 19 and it's true now. I am so grateful to be on the path that is mine. I feel unsure where exactly the expression of this mission will lead me and concurrently so absolutely clear I'm just where I'm supposed to be. I trust it's unfolding. I am listening, always.

This weekend, I listened and something new and important came to me.

While I am in service to childhood, I struggle remarkably as a parent myself. I feel constantly challenged, unappreciated, run ragged, lonely. At its core, these feelings come from a fear that I am not enough, that no one hears me. They come from my own lostness-- from, yet again, looking for my completeness, my identity, in another person. It is asking someone who is so early in the process of becoming in the world to affirm me. It's so much cognition, so many years of learning and studying early childhood development and then clinging to that as my identity. I should know how to be with my children, how to support them, how to respond. My constant failure to do everything perfectly makes me angry. It challenges this "why" I identified as my path so long ago.

This weekend I took the girls to Vedanta for one of their Sunday morning talks. They roamed around the verdant hills overlooking the Channel Islands, picking flowers and eating lemon bread with the Sunday School teacher, while I listened to a talk on the Divine Mother. I spend quite a bit of time contemplating the balance between masculine and feminine; I know so much of my purpose is in holding the nurturing feminine energy, that softness and fluidity. I once received an intuitive massage-- a combination of physical touch and intuitive readings. The man told me my left side, the feminine side, felt like a great oak tree, a grounded force that provided shelter and comfort to so many. This reading felt so resonant for me, and there was this sneaky bit of pride in that connection that has proved to be my challenge.

Listening to the talk, I had a revelation, the missing piece in all this work. I have been attempting to offer that nurturance from myself. I've been delivering it from a human place, from my own effort; it is laden with ego. In the end, that will only exhaust me, as well as having clear limitations. The true invitation is to offer that love, that feminine wisdom, through the channel of the divine. It is not mine to offer; it is an infinite, unending source of love, which I can embody and express but it is not generated from me as an individual.

The Divine Mother is my mother. The Divine Mother is the source of any comfort I might offer. I am simply a vessel.

I so often fail to allow myself to feel nurtured in this life. I am constantly seeking it, seemingly in futility. As if to challenge that idea, which flickered into consciousness as I had this realization on Sunday, the most glorious breeze swirled around me at just that moment. I was sitting on the porch of this beautiful temple on the most perfect fall day, my face blissfully shaded and my legs, warming in the sun. The breeze was a Disney breeze; it was somehow visible; it was the twirl of magic at Cinderella's feet as her rags turned into a ball gown; it was palpable. 

It came to me and said, I am your mother.

I almost laughed.

I've created this entire world where my life happens predominantly outside. I extoll the gifts of nature so often. And yet somehow I've been missing this very obvious message that the love I crave is quite literally all around me. She is my mother. The breeze is my mother; the coast live oaks and their abundant season of acorns are my mother; the Channel Islands are my mother; the lemonade berry and the coyote brush and the wild fennel and the elderberry and the nopales are my mother. Mother Nature is my Divine Mother. She is my messenger, my guide, my mentor, my pathway to love. She has a strong back, a soft front, and a wild heart. She is always here loving me, showing me, teaching me, holding me. I don't need to go in search of that love or nurturance myself; it is truly just outside the walls of my home. She is everywhere.

I want for nothing. I have landed on the exact path, in the exact place I am meant to be. I am here in service to childhood and nature is always here to remind me.  It is expansive thought, endless creativity and curiosity, open-heartedness, energy, joy, natural connection, fearlessness, and radiant love. It is seasons, death and rebirth, patience, perseverance, blatant or sometimes almost imperceptible rhythms, collaboration, harshness, resilience, beauty, and radiant love. I am here for what is wild, for what lives both so firmly in its identity and also entirely outside of it, for all the ways in which we are inextricably linked. I am here in worship to all of this daily. It is a reverent prayer. 

It is not an identity. It's a purpose much greater than me. I am here in service to love, to childhood, to nature. Two decades later, I don’t just know, I don’t just feel it, I have built my life in service to this mission. I am aligned, I am clear, I am nurtured, I am mothered by the universe around me, I am safe, I am loved, I am love. I am so, so grateful.

On longing.

Michael asks what I'd tell Melby were she in the same situation.

I immediately know I'd tell her about when we were ready to have a baby. During a visit to California, Nic and I had high-fived on Hendry's beach after practicing our handstands.  The high-five sealed our decision to start a family together. That same day I told my parents we were going to have a baby and, perched on a stool in the kitchen, somewhat anxiously requested their permission to name her Melby, should she be a girl.

Once you are ready, you're so ready, but first I also wanted to make sure my body was healthy. After decades on birth control, I needed to know my cycle was regular, strong. So I removed the hormones, continued my somewhat orthorexic diet and exercise routine, and saw my acupuncturist routinely to monitor my health. Several months in, we decided I was stable enough to begin trying to conceive. And then several excruciating months later, I one day found myself the crankiest I'd been in ages, my nipples an unfamiliar kind of sore. Somewhat unceremoniously, during a pee break from some show Nic and I were watching together, I pulled out a pregnancy test and discovered I was having a baby. A baby girl, of course. My Melby.

The part of that story that's important now is the waiting— the painful stretch of time between that high-five and the positive pregnancy test. While it certainly wasn't long, maybe a matter of months, half a year at most, that time was made of the stickiness of longing. The impatience for a new chapter to begin.

It challenged me, and, once she was born I knew I had been waiting for her. I was not meant to have any other baby. I was meant to have her, my fierce, reluctant, sensitive, curious, brilliant child, and that required some waiting. We cannot rush what is meant for us, only await it with grace or torturous impatience.

Currently I am in the latter category. I am waiting.

This is the story I will tell Melby when she is one day waiting, too. There is no way to race for what's meant for you.

Today I am not waiting to have a baby. I am waiting for partnership.

Saying it is uncomfortable. I feel like I am not supposed to want such a thing. The law of attraction says I just need to emanate, embody, live love and love will come to me. I should not wait. I should not want. I should blissfully live my most aligned life and love will come when I least expect it!!! 

The truth is, I've always been looking for it. Male attention has been important to me my whole life. So much of the work I've been doing lately has been in balancing my own masculine and feminine. I have this powerful masculine energy. It is wounded warrior energy. It is always on high alert, ready to fight and protect. He is prepared and fierce and capable. He is also exhausted and overworked and makes very little room for this soft, creative, flowing feminine I also long to embody. I have been working to meet him with kindness and respect, but also with an understanding that allows him to lay down his swords. So much of my longing is for someone to hold that grounded, protective energy for me. It was always my job to hold that for Nic and myself. I hold it for my girls. I hold it at school. I hold it and hold it and hold it and I feel like I can never quite relax because the vigilance is mine to uphold. It is beyond my nature. I'm tired.

I listen to a podcast from an astrologer who urges me to explore my wildest sexual fantasy, followed by prompts to unearth what's beneath it. When I close my eyes and imagine what I deeply crave, what my animal body is screaming for, I only see myself folded over the arms of a man. I am just being held in full surrender. I am completely relaxed. I want to be cared for. While I am a progressive woman in many ways, I do believe the masculine balances the feminine and I am looking specifically for that, and specifically in a man. I am looking for a truly embodied, grounded man to balance my deeply creative and juicy feminine. I am looking for a partner.

Recently, a friend I made last year at a training came to visit. We spent two days in my sweet little house living my tiny fantasy. We roamed around outside and laughed and talked endlessly. We sat by a watering hole after a sweaty hike, looking into each others' eyes and speaking truths that would have otherwise felt uncomfortable to me. We read good words together. We held each other. I could feel my heart open and flowing and his as well. I could feel my swords being laid to rest.

My heart was so full and then when he left, I felt cracked open. He was a drop of water in the desert. It was almost unbearable to my physical body, my heart.

Shortly thereafter, I sat at the playground one day, while my girls played, blissfully unaware of the heartache of adulthood, and cried. I kept asking myself what this pain meant, where did it begin? Because it wasn't with him.

When I close my eyes, I'm in front of the Gap Kids that still stands in the open air mall in downtown Santa Barbara, sobbing. I must be 8 or 9 years old, in third grade. My hair is in a short blonde bob and at this age, I'm already crying when I miss a single percent on French tests. Several decades later, I don't speak a word of French but I do still carry a seemingly primordial fear of imperfection. 

My dad, always deeply generous, wants to buy me this denim bomber jacket I must have seen on one of my dozen of other classmates. It has snaps and tan sleeves with striped ribbing at the sleeves and neck. I remember being desperate to own this article of clothing; even then it seemed that one more thing might be the portal, the missing piece to feeling complete. Complete or maybe, just a little bit less like myself, a little incomplete, just different enough.

It is being offered to me, but there is this deep, sticky part of me that says, You do not deserve something you want so much. So I sob in front of the store, resisting my dad's desire to do something nice for me. The tears are not a denial of the gift; they are a fear I don't deserve it. I can almost feel my prayer that his own will to give to me will override my resistance to allowing it. I need a tsunami of love to overtake me. It has to be that big. I need someone to insist I am deserving.

As an adult, I frequently find myself asking others, What is your relationship to want? As in, can you allow yourself to want? Not need or deserve or earn, but just to deeply want something? Can you indulge without justification? Can you allow yourself pleasure?

Am I allowed to want to be in love? Am I allowed to want partnership? Am I good enough to be loved, wholly? Is it possible that one day someone will see me as I am and fall in love with exactly that person? Who is this girl who can't accept a nice gift and how is she keeping me from what I want? Or is it just timing?

My deepest longing right now is to be seen, to be met, to be held. I've been solo parenting for 2.5 years now, running a school alone for 4, protecting myself fiercely for perhaps 40. Some radical part of me wishes I could escape this longing, outsmart it. I wish I could be so satisfied by my own presence that I wanted absolutely nothing else. I am not delusional about love. I don't think it will fix me, make me love myself. I think it's a mirror, a portal to knowing myself better, a joy, a source of both pleasure and pain. I long for the radical source of growth, expansion, and connection that is sacred partnership.

What I understand is that my heart has broken open. I’ve received energy work many times over the past years and every time receive the message that there’s something constricting my heart. There’s a cage around it, a rope, a big squeeze, a suffocation. It’s all the love I tell myself I don’t deserve. It’s all I long for but don’t allow myself to acknowledge. It’s all I’m afraid to want. It’s all my shame and self-loathing and pain braided into a noose.

I have tried to unshackle it myself to no avail. I believe the hurt I felt after my friend's visit was the beginning of the softening of a lifetime of constriction. We heal in connection and he cracked me open. He was a portal to beginning to healing something that has long stayed guarded. What feels like pain is actually a coming back to life, my heart willing itself once again to be open, to breathe. The bittersweet agony of allowing myself to be vulnerable. 

I'm in it. I feel impatient. Someday, in hindsight, I will understand this waiting. I will see how I needed time to become the person who was ready for the exact kind of love I wanted. I will hold this winding road of unfolding as a story to tell my babies when they are again someday in the forest of their own murky becoming. I will look back and it will all be crystalline.

I will love and I will be loved. I will be love. My heart will continue to soften, to open up, however terrifying, and when the moment finally arrives that someone extends a gift my way, the one that connects to my deepest longing, I will look at him and say, yes, yes, yes, yes. I deserve this.

To beth on her 40th birthday

The day I turn 40, the first thought I think upon waking is a very clearly articulated, Thank you. My gingham covers are swaddled around me; the leaky grey morning light of Santa Barbara's May is eking around the corners of the bedroom curtains; I am in the same washed out waffle knit sleep pants and tank I keep returning to; the house is quiet; I am alone. At 40, I wake up alone. Whatever this all is, this exact moment, thank you. 

To this last year of my life, thank you. Thank you for such incredible transformation and growth. Thank you for being over.

I keep thinking of the stretch before I turned 30. It was filled with the fervent beginnings of new love with Nic— long distance letters and longing. Passion and projection. Radical devotion and self-abandonment. It was devouring each others' faces on public transportation and Muir Beach hikes in search of heart-shaped rocks. It was belabored runs along the Embarcadero followed by farmers' market pluots and pastrami sandwiches from Wise Sons. It was wistful eye gazing and road trip adventures and so, so many arguments, such an incredible exchange of volume. 

On the day I turned thirty, one of my best friends threw me an elaborate party. She had coordinated so many people I loved to contribute and create truly one of the most beautiful tributes to another person possible. It was filled with floral aprons and manual typewriters, cupcakes and kegs of locally brewed beer, music and celebration. I wore a strappy dress covered in colorful giraffes. I pinned my hair back to one side and watched as my friends got drunk and hammered out love notes to me on index cards that were then filed away in a vintage recipe box. I felt so loved. I felt like I had arrived, newly in love at the beginning of a new decade of life.

Thank you thirties, for all of your beauty, for the birth of my children, for your sage and brutal teachings.

In contrast, two weeks before I turn 40, I receive news that Nic and I are at last legally divorced. Despite spending two years prior to that in separation, despite pushing for that bit of closure for so long, the reality of it fills me only with grief. I listen to Ray LaMontagne's "All the Wild Horses" on repeat for an hour, unloading my tears into the rug as my forehead presses down, down into the looped fabric below me, my body in child's pose.

I've been coming to this position again and again. Returning to reverence, to some sort or prayer, prostrating myself before the universe. Recently, after such a wasteland of emotion, I learned to cry again. Not the tears of a touching movie or news of a loved one's death, but the everyday tears of disappointment or fear, hurt or grief. The tears of being so wonderfully human and all the ways in which, painfully or joyfully, I encounter the world with so much raw feeling. I remembered how to cry and then I began to sob daily, emptying this reservoir of rigor that I've been upholding for four decades now. I stopped trying to understand why exactly and just felt grateful for the lightening of the load.

May no man's touch ever tame you

May no man's reign ever chain you

I am becoming untamed. I am releasing my shackles. I am saying, Fuck this shit to the lies I’ve been fed about being a woman, a mother, a human, about my body, my role in society, my limitations. Extracting myself from the lies about education, our food systems, the government, medicine, health and wellness, religion. For the first time in my life, I'm experimenting with what it feels like to allow myself to be justifiably angry at times. Thank you, Beth, for waking up enough to blaze your own path, for undertaking such liberating and excruciating work.

For the last year, since removing my IUD, each month before my period, I experience this high vibration feeling. It feels like a high-pitched squealing, a tautness that's just waiting for some sort of release. Usually for at least two to three days, it feels like the world is ending, like nothing could ever be right, like I am frustration and grief and discontent embodied. I am a rabid dog, a machine of rage. I want to eat bloody meat and be loud and hurt people around me. My anger is terrifying, unfamiliar, unacceptable.

And then I'll bleed and instead of holding my energy, the weight of the entire world, up above my heart, it flows through and out of me, a sweet liberation.

The time prior to the transition to this new decade has felt like the Groundhogs day version of that frenetic energy. It is a never ending loop, a constant quiver. I have felt, quite honestly, like I'm going crazy. I can almost feel the tension between who I've been and who I want to allow myself to become, that frantic line between the old neural pathways and a totally new way of being. My ego is dying and thrashing for dear life to survive.

Thank you, body and mind, for trying so hard to protect me. It’s okay to let go now.

I keep looking for the next thing to do, as if there's some undisclosed road map to growth. Lately, so much of my communication looks like calling my healer in desperation, pleading, Tell me what to do, knowing full well, he will never do such a thing. His voice always full of humor and compassion, he slows me down and asks me to listen to my own guidance. I always know the answer, even when I don't like it.

I always know.

Michael was the first person in my entire life to make space for me to hear my own voice, to assure me that I already contained all the wisdom in the world. He never offers advice; he just offers the most gentle, loving space, one in which my usual severity and fear can relax enough to practice seeing clearly. Every time I grasp for answers, for the right thing to do next, he says repeatedly what I now, finally, understand: It's not something to do; it's a way of being with yourself. Be, don't do.

That has become the salient message in my life as I embark upon my next year on this planet. Be, don't do. Be, don't do. Be, don't do.

Be wild, be weird, be big. Be you. It's not what you do; it's how you do it. It's not a list to complete; it's a way of being in the world.

As a gift to myself for my fortieth birthday, I take three days to go camping in the desert alone. When I arrive, I set up my tent and shade shelter. I make a little kitchen and add some wildflowers and chunks of quartz to decorate the table. Ravenous, I sautee veggies and rice with bacon and add a fried egg. I eat quietly in the blazing heat, taking in the beauty of the mountains and the curling sheets of sediment in the dry riverbed that are peppered with yucca and brittlebush.

And then I sob.

Because I'm uncomfortable. Because I want to feel happy. Because I think, this is what I wanted so now I'm supposed to be happy.

Except in this instance, happy is just another thing to do. I want to do happy. To act it out. To check it off my list. To prove it, to say I've done it, to achieve it.

I suspect at least phantoms of this instinct will exist in my life for a long, long time. Except now I notice. Now I see that judgment and expectation come up and I can say, oh hello.

So I let myself cry. Hello, you are disappointed that you got what you want and it still feels uncomfortable and now you are crying. 

Thank you tears, thank you body, thank you inherent wisdom.

After I allowed myself those tears, my trip was happy. I read three full books, took barefoot ambles to the base of these glorious mountains, made a nature wheel, cooked beautiful meals, made some truly shitty attempts at whittling, collected rocks, almost never wore clothes, and napped. Oh I napped. One morning, I laid like a rotisserie chicken in the sun for almost two hours, making a quarter turn every fifteen minutes or so, just gliding in and out of consciousness. No music, no reading, no conversation with myself. I just let the heaviness seep out of me into the earth. I said thank you.

Thank you, desert. Thank you for your teachings of solitude, extremism, resilience.

Throughout the trip, I repeatedly stepped over a latex glove that had dropped out of my first aid kit. It was on the ground with its middle finger up. The first time I saw it, I laughed out loud, the sound of my voice almost startling me from my own murmuring silence. I loved that offensive glove so much I decided not to move it until I left, and despite so much wind, every time it landed in a new spot, that middle finger stayed up. It felt like a humorous little message from the universe that said, Fuck off, it's not that serious.

Each time I laughed, audibly.

Thank you humor for keeping me afloat during times of tumult.

It’s not that serious.

You do not have to be good

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

What do I love? What am I here to do?

Everything I read says to circle back to childhood. The secrets to your desires, your purpose, your joy is in the games you played, the things you imagined. I am so clear on the fact that I work with children in part to tune in to this creativity and joy in myself. That inner child is so alive and vibrant within me; she's just rattling around in the prison of calcified expectations.

I know just who she is and what she loves. She loves to sing, to dance, to be big. She loves to love. She loves to read. She loves to be alone and then with people and then alone.

So the way forward looks like this.

I will sing and dance and be big. I will love. I will read. I will be alone and then with people and then alone.

I found some dance classes that aren't classes at all, but just opportunities to move my body in community without the alcohol or unwanted touching. I found spaces in which to chant and sing, to open up my throat and be heard. I don't want to perform. I don't want to do. I want to express, not impress. I want the deluge of life force that is me to flow freely through my body. I want to allow myself my fullest expression without concern for how it looks, what anyone thinks, if it's good enough, if it's right. I do not have to be good. I want to be with people and love them with my whole emphatic heart and then I want to be alone and recharge and read and listen to myself.

I am trending away from asking external guides— even those that are healthy— to tell me where to go next. I am turning inward. I am finding joy. I am creating clarity. I am opening up. I am healing. I am grateful.

Thank you inner child for showing me the way. Thank you for your certainty and clarity. Thank you for your unbridled joy.

I feel quite clear that on the other side of all of his endless introspection is something much greater, more interconnected. That my true liberation lies in releasing myself from the constraints of internal conflict and recognizing my place in a much broader community, within the cosmos, within all of time, within nature. I am most clear when I'm outside, listening to birds, toes in the dirt.

Within forest school, I am gifted a container for my own healing. Each day I visit the woods, remember what it's like to be a child, to sing, read, laugh, move, play. I drink up sunlight and the companionship of those who value me most as my most authentic self. I am stripped bare. It is the ultimate being and not doing. I did not make that school. I do not own it. It was truly an expression of divinity; it came from a moment of alignment, so crystalline I can recall the exact place and time everything clicked into place. It is both my purpose and my healing combined.

And I am grateful. I am healing through my work, I am healing through my tears, I am healing through my discomfort and my undoing and my humor and my whole big tumbling heart. I am healing and I am so grateful.

I woke up 40 and I said thank you. Out of so many words, they are the only ones that matter. They are the prayer I awoke with, the prayer I will continue to make, they are my freedom, my connection, my source. For every messy bit that’s been and all that is to come, for this decade, for my voice, for my integral part in this beautiful web of life, for all there is to become and know, for the chance to just be this lifetime, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Chatham 1986

In the photo, my mom is holding Kate and me as young girls on a beach. We are both small pink barnacles clinging to her hips as an anchor in the wind, Kate peering at the camera, while my face is nestled into my mom's neck. The beach is all tangles of seaweed and silvery strand grass blowing sideways. An overturned yellow dinghy lies behind us. The sky is no color, a smear of cold nothingness.

I've revisited this picture a thousand times over the years. Of all the photos I've squirreled away from my parents' haphazard collection of memories, this one resonates with me most. Something about my mom's face makes my heart ache— her squinted eyes, her relaxed closed-lip smile, the effortlessness with which she holds us both. She feels like motherhood, embodied. In truth, I feel a longing to crawl back into her arms in the same way and allow myself a moment of respite from the elements, a moment to feel so safe and sure of my place in the world.

One evening, at the suggestion of one of my guides, I sit on my bed and do nothing. I don't meditate; I don't do breathwork; I don't listen to relaxing music, I don't read or journal or journey or intentionally radiate lovingkindness; I just sit and allow myself to exist without my usual urgency or insistence upon productivity. My eye catches this photo where it is taped on one of our drawers and in that stillness, I immediately begin to cry. At this point in my healing journey, it feels clear to me that tears don't have to "mean" anything; oftentimes it's just stored up emotion and stress leaving my body. I am grateful to have this photo to tether me; we stay in contact for nearly 30 minutes and at the end of my time of nothing, I peel the photo from its place and flip to the back where in my dad's handwriting it says:

Chatham

8/19/86

I recognize the date as my parents' 19th wedding anniversary. My mom was 39, just as I am now. Outside of this I know nothing; I have so many questions about this trip, about the people they were, the person I was, how this moment in time filters into each of our personal kaleidoscopes of becoming, how this latent memory was part of the vein of my own evolution into present-day Beth.

These questions fuel the idea for the gift I give my dad for his birthday, just a few days later, which is actually a thinly veiled gift for myself. I offer that twice a month we'll sit down to look at a family photo together; he will tell me whatever comes up for him in viewing it and I will take some time to commit my rendition of those stories into something written. It is the gift of storytelling, togetherness, transcription, sharing memories.

We decide to have our first meeting at Handlebar on his birthday— an extension of his usual 3 pm visit for a cup of coffee, ever a man of routine. As we stand in line, he pulls out a leather planner the size of a billfold that is embossed in gold with the words "Boston Diary 1986." He used the planners as journals to collect little tidbits of what his days then held and has kept it pristine almost 38 years later. As I flip through it, the baristas shout birthday tidings to him over the counter; they clap for him, they cheer. Part of his routine, his essence, is also being deeply lovable. His two dollar bills, his consistency, his generosity and thoughtfulness, his quiet kindness are all part of his charm.

After a birthday latte splurge, I learn the trip to Chatham was inspired by a visit to East Weymouth Savings Bank, in which my dad had invested. For a lifetime I'd known my dad manages investments daily, but not until last year did I know those investments were exclusively in small banks. Knowing him this doesn't surprise me, but somehow I still missed this explicit fact. 

This kernel of knowing emerged over one of our dinner conversations that happened while I lived with my parents for a year and a half after separating from Nic. When the girls were with me, dinner conversations orbited around the girls themselves almost exclusively, but in their absence, my parents would become somewhat of a mental reel of memories. First dates. Old apartments. Family trips. High school teachers. Dinner with friends. They each had pieces of this tape of their mostly shared history they were splicing together with words— a ricochet of remembering, a tumble of recollection, each of them feeding off of each other's prompts.

I remember few of the details of the stories themselves, but so much of the energy of watching my parents recall the life they've lived together. I could feel them disappear together to past moments, reliving them in real time. I could feel the joy and innocence and sheer pain of their evolution together. The loss. The triumph. They became a symphony, their parts so deeply intertwined to make something whole and beautiful. Somehow inside of all that was a love of investing in small banks that I hadn't yet heard until I was 39. 

Of course we took a family vacation to chase a small bank.

When we arrived, apparently one of our bags was missing at the airport, our room wasn't ready, the machine to make room keys was down, the front desk man apparently asked my mother to keep a 2 and 4 year old quiet after we'd been traveling all day and were denied access to our room, and then later when we were finally nestled in our room, the fire alarm went off. My mother will proudly add to this story that she refused to leave the building at this point; it had been enough chaos and we'd burn down with the building if we needed to.

As a mother myself, I fully understand.

Other high points of the trip committed to transcription were apparently many trips to the Stop N Shop, during one of which, I peed on the floor. Eating haddock every night; ("your mom was in heaven"). Ice cream at Emack and Bolios. Me creating chaos in the children's room at the Mother Church in Boston. Also, clearly, beaches, wind, overturned dinghies. It is a swirl, little bits of history. I can feel the spaces gaping between them, all the moments unseen, even the spaces where my mom's voice should be chiming in to complete things, how quiet and somehow incomplete my dad seems in her absence.

The question I then ask is, why Cape Cod? What felt so special about this place that he went home and named an entire room after the place? My real question, the one I ask myself and others constantly, is, is it your place? Is it the place your body, heart, and mind feel most connected, most alive, most seen? Is it a home you didn't know you were missing? Does that place exist for all of us? Are we constantly fumbling our way back to someone unidentified place that brings us back to life?

Is that where you belong?

Without really waiting for an answer, I offer that Big Sur feels like that to me. Dad laughs in agreement, says maybe Big Sur feels that way to everyone. And then he adds, "You're kind of like Big Sur— majestic...gloriously beautiful, but also don't go around the corner thinking it's going to still be there. At any moment, there could be a landslide."

I pause to write the exact words down. I pause because I've been seen. I pause because so much of our tumult as humans is in the spaces we feel not allowed to be our most authentic selves, and here, in two effortless sentences, my father has shown he knows me, me exactly.

My whole life I've been at war with that person. I've tried to be something tepid, balanced, neutral; I just wanted to feel like I belong. I've tried to be a little less turbulent and consuming than the person I appear to be now, but in truth I am exactly what my dad described— my surface has the potential to crumble at any moment and yet I am anchored by the ancient roots of an entire forest of trees. I am both rugged stability and turbulence, not one or the other.

In my question about spaces, I realize what I'm wondering is what the process of becoming your truest self feels like for each person. Do they experience it in physical spaces, on trips, in jobs or relationships or children? Do they one day stand at the edge of a dreary beach clutching their babies to their hips, so sure of their own place in the world despite the wind beating against them? Do they close their mouth and smile calmly knowing that one day they'll radiate this energy forward into the universe into a single photo their daughter will herself witness while falling apart as a means of just beginning to collect herself again? Do they one day realize they are Big Sur, embodied, when their dad so aptly relates its essence to their own?

I come again to the image of my mom on the beach. I, too, am a mother of two young girls. I, too, am on the cusp of turning 40. For a moment, I feel connected to everything— to her, to that time we shared together, to my childhood self, to myself as a mother, to my dad who has cradled us and the memories of all these experiences for a lifetime, to the wind that whips at our legs, to all that crumbles, to all that stays standing. It is all part of this unfolding, this becoming human.

Wherever you go, you belong. I can see it in my comfort in the crook of my mother's neck. I can feel it in my dad's words about me as a reflection of Big Sur. I stand in it now as a mother myself, having become someone else’s anchor against the elements.

After staring at this photo for two weeks straight, I  tape it back to my drawer where this all began. The bedroom I now share with my girls fills with the warmth of my mom’s calm smile. I step outside into the afternoon sun where, as if from a dream, the wind picks up just for a moment as if to say, You belong here. You belong. 

to beth on her 39th birthday.

Two weeks before my thirty-ninth birthday, I start reading the obituaries. Rather, I consume them. I sob audibly in public, mouth full of al pastor, the stories of the deceased, and the subtle flavor of loneliness that always haunts me these days. Engineers and mothers, veterans and professors, grandfathers and dancers. They lived their lives, which, through the lens of grief and gratitude, are all filled with unique shades of magnificence and now they are gone.

I sob because the obituaries are just what I needed. Not death itself. But the swirling stretch of life that preceded it. The clarity with which we view what has already happened. The way even the most tragic of events end up having their place in the puzzle of things. When we stand back, the mosaic of life— all the shattered but colorful little bits we cobble together— seems beautiful.

Life is beautiful.

The last time I remember feeling this retrospective clarity so deeply must have been ten years earlier. In my imagination, I will pretend this experience, too, was at the doorstep of my birthday. Perhaps as I approach the last year of each decade of my life, I am met with a moment of reckoning that insists I look back in awe.

In this memory, I am standing on 27th Street in San Francisco outside the house where I live in a basement in-law in a senior couple's home. Rita, my landlord, is witty, attentive, thoughtful, and kind, but not overly so. She occasionally leaves a bundle of alstroemeria from the backyard or some leftover soup on my doorstep but also intermittently, the slightly aggressive note about my indoor plant which might leave a stain on her carpet. I frequently straddle the line between feeling awe and annoyance in regards to her.

Today she is her warmest self and she meets me outside to share some news with me. She lets me know that she is divorcing her husband, Greg, after some decades together. He has always struck me as a bit bumbling and a poor match for her, but I have long since learned that the mysteries of others' relationships are not for me to judge. He is moving out soon and she will live alone in her castle on the hill.

Something about the way she speaks and the fact that she is choosing to share something so personal with me at all feels deeply significant in a universal sense. As if she is opening a portal into a certain window of life that I have not yet begun to understand. I remember looking out at the fading light of San Francisco, the rolling hills, the way in which the city is both so compact and so full, and feeling the ache of transition. The palpable pause between what was and what lies ahead, and the gravity we feel when we stand witness to what we have chosen for ourselves. The feeling of being suspended in that hallway between two seemingly different realities. I am wistful and raw, an open wound.

If I could look forward to the decade ahead of me, would I do it all again?

Later that year I met Nic.

Recently I was in line at my neighborhood coffee shop when I saw Pliny the Elder sitting in the refrigerated case. After so many years of tumult, I am slowly learning not to be so reactive to every single thing which stirs me internally, but this double IPA somehow feels like a personal attack and brings me to tears before work.

That same decade ago, Pliny was hot on the beer scene and nearly impossible to find. The one Whole Foods in town would receive a delivery once a week on Wednesdays and customers were limited to purchasing a maximum of two for the few fleeting moments they remained on the shelves. Early on in our love, Nic and I managed to get our hands on a duo of Pliny and spent a magical afternoon in Dolores Park intoxicated by this strong beer and the fervor of new love. I can still see my big gold hoops, his beard, the wild parrots, and the repeated image of the universe collecting itself with precision to create this exact moment just for us, now. 

This moment stands in direct opposition to that of an obituary. In my memory, our Plinys on a hill are so full of possibility, of anticipation. It is not the memory of what was, but rather the hope of all that might be.

Sometime years later, we tried Pliny again and agreed it had either gotten worse, beer in general had gotten better, or our memory and experience had colored it with a value that wasn't quite there in reality.

Does it matter which one is true?

Tomorrow I am 39. There is something about this moment in time that feels like all of those aches combined. It is both anticipation and remembering. It is an ending and a possibility. It is the understanding that, in fact, everything is always changing. Both the hope of change and the fear of it have proved themselves to be absurd because the one constant is change, itself.

Maybe that's what I learned this year. Whatever claims I make about my life, myself, are pointless because they are constantly changing, as am I. For so long I've clung to certainty; I've made a life raft out of security, a buoy out of knowing, but now, only in burning my life as I knew it to the ground, have I found any certainty at all, and that is, essentially, that I know nothing.

I give up, in the best way.

I'm not afraid of being forty. I'm not afraid of wrinkles. Despite how I live my life and endlessly talk in circles over it all, I am not even afraid of being fat or ugly. I’m not afraid of being poor or alone or wrong or stupid. 

I am afraid only of living my life halfway and so sometime recently, I refused to do so any longer. 

I started to write what I want, wear what I want, eat and move and love how I want. I started saying no when I meant no, speaking my truth, holding boundaries even when it’s uncomfortable. I stopped asking for permission or approval. It’s been scary and I’ve stumbled a lot, falling back into self doubt and a certain desperation for comfort but continually I reroute myself into alignment.

Life is beautiful. If anything, this is what I know. If we choose to look at it with the clarity of hindsight, we can see how even the messy bits, or often, especially those, add so much beauty to the kaleidoscope of life. It is fractal and ever-changing and tumbling and wild and when I can stand back to just behold it all instead of planning out each moment, it feels like a total fucking miracle.

My mom asked me recently if I wanted to write my own obituary. She has a neighbor friend, who has written her own, now years ago. This woman is poised and beautiful. Her house is a wood-roofed cottage covered in ivy and filled with perfect things. She regularly gifts handmade baked goods and bundles of homegrown sweet peas to her friends and neighbors on every holiday and birthday. Externally she seems every bit immaculate, quaint, enviably together. Naturally she has plans to close her time on earth with equal tidiness and grace as she lived on earth by pre-writing her own obituary.

My swift answer to my mother was no. I will not be writing my own obituary. Despite or maybe because of my deep love of words. I will be sure to close my time with the same recklessness and wild abandon that I have lived my life on earth. I will daily acknowledge the reality that I am becoming, every day, that whatever I think I know surely won't be true another moment from now, that my ability to sum up who I was will be impossible until I become whoever I will be. I will not be caged in, especially not by my perception of myself.

It's all changing.

I longed for a place for so long. I longed for an identity, a title, a partner, a home, a role, a landing spot. I longed to carve out that Beth-shaped crevice in the world, to nestle into it comfortably, to find security in knowing.

I have let that longing go.

What it will say when it's all done, I don't know. I don't know the details. I don't know the facts. I don't know what will become. All I know is that when I'm gone, there's no iota of possibility that it will say: she lived her life halfway.

Instead let it be, whatever the details: She was absolutely, totally, unabashedly alive… until she wasn't.

And then may they scatter me to the wind, so I can live again.

on a moment.

This is not the picture or the moment, and yet it is. My wild girl, all her own.

Watching Melby and the flickering bits of sun through my half-opened eyes feels like something between a memory and a dream. I rarely feel so relaxed as a mother, as I do now, lying horizontal in the warm morning sand, witnessing my girl dig in the quiet inlet to Hendry's beach. She is catching fish with a stick, wading in the shallow water, except the fish are bits of seaweed she carefully lays across the end of her stick and carries back to me, an offering at my feet.

Usually Melby insists I play in some particular fashion; more often she achieves whatever she thinks she wanted, only to ask for the next thing and then the next, but now, in this peaceful moment, she is content for me to lie watching her. I wonder, again, if I am calm for once because she is playing peacefully, or if she is playing peacefully for once, because I am calm.

And I'm sure, really, that both are true. There is no greater evidence of the complex interplay that is all relationships than the parent-child dynamic that can so quickly escalate to a place of stress and anger or so quickly return to something peaceful. Both parties are culpable and both are responding to the other's energetic output.

Over a month into quarantine, I wouldn't say I'm relaxed, but there is some element of suspended reality that allows me to feel slow in ways I don't normally feel slow. And that, in turn, I think has given Melby some peace too.

She is wearing an oversized red gingham swimsuit-- a hand-me-down from one of our generous older girlfriends. At this point, I can't remember what came from whom, but each new thing we uncover is a treasure, filled with even more meaning because it lived a life before now, it is filled with the wisdom of earlier 2 year olds. The suit puffs out around her torso, a little blue bow clipping it all together at her back. Her thighs are starting to tan and she has her first freckle on her right cheek. 

I feel both in awe of this girl and also slightly terrified by how much I love her. I still can't believe she came from my body, and suddenly it occurs to me that she no longer clamors to crawl back inside me. This revelation makes me want to crawl inside her somehow, to stay attached, feel what she feels, see what she sees.

Sagging with the strength of ocean breeze is a  wispy top-knot in her silky hair that doesn't tell the story of the tantrum that went along with it this morning, but I know. I think about it watching her. How I motioned to put a pony in for her, she screamed NO! and as I, choosing my battles, went to put the brush and hair ties away, she collapsed at my feet, immediately sobbing. I asked her to use her words and she unraveled. She wanted a pony but didn't want a pony but didn't want me to remove the option of the pony. 

I look at that tiny knot of hair and for a moment it is all the twists and challenges of motherhood in one-- not just fixing my child's problems, but giving her the space, the language, the ability to recognize them for herself. To name them. So they have less power over her. So she can call them out into the open and either ask for help in solving them or create her own solutions. But then also demonstrating and teaching compassion-- the ability to recognize someone else's challenges and help without being asked, to give freely.

Sometimes I get mired in the details. Everything I do right is some thing I am also doing wrong. Every line I draw I question. I just want to do right by my girl. And often the moments, the days even, are harder in creating a future I think is right for her.

I crane my neck to look at her more clearly, and she shouts, "Lie down, mama!"

She has started calling me "mom"; she must feel, somehow, how much it leaves me gaping, like the space between us is far too great. She is practicing her distance from me. But in this moment, she calls me mama. She is my baby, not a baby at all, and I listen. I lay back, grateful that today, all she wants from me is to be quiet and watch.

And what else do I have to do?

Watch this girl. She is now and she also, somehow, feels like a memory. She feels like forever.

I push my head back into the sand, and keep my eyes loosely tracking my small fisherman, the girl who grew inside me and is now growing me daily in always unanticipated ways. I feel an overwhelming urge to call her into my arms, to beg for a hug, to swallow her up, but just then she runs down the edge of the water, her arms spread out in the wind, her single stick acting as a divining rod for adventure.

She looks back and almost catches my eye, but then, keeps going. 

on the glorious awkwardness

I don't know if I remember, or if I've replayed it so many times in my head that I remember each subsequent version of the memory, which has been on a decreasing-in-frequency yet perpetual loop since 2002, but I remember it well regardless.

It was move-in day for freshmen at Berkeley. It was, in fact, the first of two possible move-in days-- a fact my family hadn't realized. We were, of course, prompt and I'd been deposited on the first allotted day after the transfer of much emotion and things from our Volvo station wagon. 

I had awaited my two roommates with great anticipation, especially since I'd sent them both an email at the address provided by the school some time before our arrival, but clearly it lacked the casual charm and wit I thought it conveyed, because neither of them responded.

So my parents drove home-- a feeling, side note, I cannot possibly imagine now having two of my own babies I spend no more than a few hours away from at a time, whose hearts I cannot imagine ever being separate from no matter how big they get-- and awaited these new people who would create the emotion and clamor and texture that was my everyday experience. And they didn't come.

A full day passed. Whether it was, in reality, some number of hours between the time my parents left, the passing night, and the girls' staggered arrivals the next day, I don't remember, but it felt interminable. I waited that whole first day to choose my bunk, because I felt sure it should be a discussion between me and my college roomies. So I didn't immediately stretch out my extra-long jersey twin sheets, but eventually night came, and after realizing they weren't coming, after chatting with uncomfortable sadness, false assuredness with my parents on my newly-acquired Nokia, I chose the most neutral spot I could muster (one top bunk, which left a bottom and the maybe-preferred other top bunk that stood above a desk), and slept.

The next day, finally, Lindsay came.

I don't remember how it happened, though she likely will, except to say we were standing outside the door and she and this boy walked up together both with cropped, bleached hair. I'm sure she introduced herself or I blurted out some line I'd been practicing in my head, but we met, we were confirmed roommates, this person was finally here, and then I said, referring to the bleached-hair boy beside her, "Is this your brother?"

To which she replied, "This is my boyfriend, Asa."

And that was it. The glorious awkwardness.

I called her boyfriend HER BROTHER.

I turned red. I don't mean my cheeks flushed in some lovely, subdued Jane Austen way. I mean I turned head to toe cherry red. 

My skin betrayed me often throughout those teenage years. When I got called on in class. When someone talked to me. When I felt embarrassed or excited. Few people believe this about me, based on my seemingly very outgoing personality, but my heart still clatters in my ears when I'm in a room and expected to introduce myself, to just say something normal like my name, where I'm from, and why I'm here today, but I don't turn red like that often anymore, and yet I can feel it still. How it felt like every bit of blood in my body was suddenly only a skin’s-depth away from erupting into hot lava, drenching everyone in my flagrant self-consciousness. How it only intensified when some teenage boy would inevitably say, "Look how red she's getting!" and how much, then especially, I longed to disappear.

I turned red because I tried to contact this person and didn't hear back and waited for this person and she didn't arrive and then when she finally did I assumed her boyfriend was her brother simply because their hair had been chemically altered in the same way.

Looking back, though it seemed with some immediacy like their hair had betrayed me, I realize too, that my 18 year old self could not imagine a person would arrive at their college experience with a partner rather than their family. I had just been dropped off by my parents in their Polo sweaters and trim dark jeans and penny loafers. I had definitely never had a boyfriend myself. It just didn't register in my brain as a possibility.

I'm not sure how long that hot, red moment of longing to implode lasted.

I think it was momentarily exacerbated by the reality that Lindsay also arrived with only 3 plastic tubs of clothing and two big picture frames filled with collaged pictures of so many friends, while I had brought a small lifetime of knick-knacks and resources that surely precisely mirrored whatever packing list the school had provided--lamps and shower caddies and books and a brand new Macbook, supplemented by a small collection of vintage typewriters that were part of my finely-crafted, very fragile persona.

I remember, vaguely, that to my horror she didn't make her bed at first— those grey sheets I had to implore her to wash over the coming months and which I often just ended up doing myself, I, always most comfortable being a mother hen. We just exchanged some words and then she and Asa went off to eat somewhere or explore Berkeley or whatever you do when you're the kind of person to have bleached hair and to arrive at college with your boyfriend of all people, or to even have a boyfriend in the first place.

Suffice it to say, we were clearly different people leading seemingly very different lives and I offered that up immediately in our awkward first encounter.

And yet, eighteen years later, we are still friends.

She was there when I met the first boy I ever loved. In fact, I inadvertently stood her up for a dinner date because I was so engrossed in talking to him. She was there when he died. She was there when, years later, someone made a small movie about our experience together and the tattoo I got because of it. She was there when I moved to San Francisco and when I had my first baby in Louisville and many many many of the seminal and everyday moments in between.

It seems somehow worth mentioning that we slept in bed often together, all through college and far into adulthood. Maybe that tied us together deeply. Even when she was in med school, across the bay, she would always make time to come see me. We'd eat and drink too much and sometimes sneak cigarettes and eat canned corn off of the floor of my basement apartment at midnight and then we'd fall asleep and she'd leave, in a suit jacket she ironed into presentability on my folding yellow kitchen table, before I even woke up. 

Lindsay will remember what I don't out of this. She has a borderline photographic memory and holds many pieces of my experience for me that I forget either with willingness or absentmindedness. At this point, each with 2 kids, living in different states, we'll sometimes go years without seeing each other, but when we do, it is an immediate return to both our friendship and some understanding of myself that lives in the way she both carries for and has crafted with me.

This was meant to be a story of glorious awkwardness.

And it was, and it is. I remember that moment of meeting her like every moment you replay in your head of someone wishing you a happy birthday and your replying, “You, too”. It was the culmination of so much anticipation; it was a microcosm of so much self-absorbed self-consciousness which still plagues me today-- my naive inability to comprehend that someone might live differently than me, my lack of perspective, my failure to just pause long enough to think sometimes. It's all still real even though I don't turn so red anymore. It was real in that moment and it's real now.

And yet, despite it all, despite myself even, I have gotten to create some of the most lasting, genuine relationships of my life, relationships that are better than me, that see me as my best self, that make me more than I allow myself to be on the daily.

I am grateful for my shortcomings, for my blurted words and red skin and small sightedness, because they prove to me that no one is looking for perfection. That you can start all wrong, make a fool of yourself, and still move through it in a way that builds a lifelong friendship.

Lindsay is now a radiation oncologist. I am a stay-at-home mom. I'm not sure which one of us you'd expect to not respond to an email or to say the definitely wrong/ weird/ awkward thing upon a much anticipated or to turn red or to bleach our hair or any of it. We are, by now, too many layers deep in being too the same and too different and too intertwined and for that, I am so grateful. 

I am grateful for the moment of glorious awkwardness that was our first meeting and all the moments since then, in which we weave in and out of each other’s lives in presence but never in energy, because, in that way, we are bound together always.

I am grateful, in fact, for every weird moment that has become something bigger and more meaningful, that’s grounded me in some way or bound me to some person. And for those that haven’t, those that just left me simmering red and feeling small, they don’t matter.

That’s what I’ve realized as I’ve grown older. They don’t matter. Not like the ones that become something so good.

I might replay that moment again and again, even til this day, but it no longer plagues me clearly. It is a funny, shared memory of the beginning of a forever friendship, and for that, I am so grateful.

Writing prompt came from Suleika Jaouad’s “Isolation Journals”:

As a human being on Planet Earth I’ve experienced my fair share of awkwardness. (Maybe more than most). I have learned to love these moments for in discomfort, valuable epiphanies are often found. Also, in retrospect, they can generate great laughter. Ah, the Glorious Awkwardness!

Reflect on a particular moment in your past when you felt most in touch with your “Glorious Awkwardness.” It could be a cringe-worthy moment you’ve replayed a thousand times in your mind. Or something essential about who you are, something unchangeable. Go back there.

What did you learn from it? Can you laugh about it? And if not, why?

help.

Nic and I have been having the same argument for nearly six years. 

It unfolds in nominally different ways each time, but usually centers around my feeling that he needs to do more around the house/ give better input about meals or activities for the family/ offer me more positive feedback/ be more engaging/ plan dates/ pick up his shit/ something similar. 

I will begin the rest of this by saying, all those things are likely true. Nic's suitcase permanently exploding week-old boxer briefs and airplane packs of mixed nuts across the entryway of every house we've ever lived in is supremely annoying. He has a unique way of rapidly opening every cupboard and jar and making a huge mess in the time it takes me to go pee. He spends a majority of his time at home just looking at his phone; he will never ever ever initiate an out-of-the-house activity; he brings attention to my flaws and insecurities in a matter-of-fact way which I recognize is both only because I  am screaming about them, asking to be noticed, and which is done in a way that is impersonal above all else, if that makes sense. They are just words. But still none of the argument is actually about him.

Because the point is, he is not perfect; we have this same fight; and then at the end of it all, I realize that all I'm fighting about is the fact that I am supremely, totally bored.

I am bored. I am so bored I could just shrink up and die.

And the fact that Nic is not operating is some imagined perfect way is only me noticing how fucking bored I am and projecting it onto his actions.

I know that if I were not so bored, I would look at Nic's pile of chonies by the door and think Good God, this guy is messy and it is annoying af but I would NOT think Nic doesn't respect me or care about how much work I do around the house and this old pair of striped underwear is a direct affront to me as a person and I should probably scream at him until I'm hoarse.

If I had other things to flush out my idea of myself, my interests, my concept of how valuable I am, then the underwear wouldn't be quite so big a deal.

I have sort of known this for years. I have made zero changes to fix it, except I get to the realization a lot faster these days.

Two nights ago, I was moping around the house-- my state of being far, far, far too often these days, and when Nic tried to drag it out of me, whatever it is-- the sickness, the discontent, the source of my malaise, I said, almost immediately, "I just want to be interesting."

This is the point at which many well-meaning people tell me I just moved/ had a baby/ had a baby that last time I had a baby/ whatever other life changes excuse a person's not being knee-deep in new new jobs, recreational activities, and leisure interests. And they would be right.

But that doesn't matter, because if I didn't mind my current lifestyle— if I were content to be moving slow, figuring it out, adjusting— it would be one thing, but I most definitely mind.

I mind. I mind.

I am a horrible stay-at-home mom. I love my girls. I give them so much love; I make them good food; I keep my house clean; I plan fun activities; I create developmentally appropriate spaces and invitations to play; I love being with them. I am good at it on a superficial level. Except I am crawling out of my skin. I am just so motherfucking bored.

I feel like my brain is literally atrophying from not being engaged. I can't remember anything. I feel physically and emotionally unmotivated. I am constantly exhausted.

It's not a baby. It is a spiritual crisis.

I need to get started. I need whatever it is that lights a fire under my ass and inspires me to write or move or dance or plant or grow or whatever else. I need that cascade. I need the energy of movement that begets movement.

Certainly I would like a job at some point. Certainly we need income. But I don't just want something to pass the time. I want something that ignites me. 

And I have literally no idea what that is.

I feel embarrassed writing this in some regard and also, it is so totally me that I feel also assured in doing it. The way I find the resources I need is often by these sweeping appeals. People feel connected to me, to my often blatant misery or lostness, to my self-criticism, my flaws, my worries. People like me, because I am willing to like and listen to them, because I can see a part of myself in literally anyone. And so I often find what I need where I don't expect it. Or, I guess, exactly where I do.

Before I make my big request, that also bears mentioning.

I moved cross country with a newborn and a very demanding 2 year old and I have to say: I did it because people helped me. People came out of the woodwork to hold my kids or take them on walks or to the zoo. An old coworker I hadn't seen in maybe a year or more came to literally pick up a truckload of trash from the alleyway behind my house. So many people brought me food. And wine. And food. People showed up at my house early on a Saturday and helped me pack all my shit away in wooden boxes bound for California. People listened to me rant and constantly asked how I was and gave my heart space and my body space.

I still fell the fuck apart. I was so frazzled and anxious. But I made it here, regardless, and I made it because people helped me and they helped me because I asked and even when I didn't ask overtly, I did with my desperation.

So before I ask for more, thank you. Thank you for being a person, who reads these words and finds some commonality or maybe also just gawks at how transparent/ verbose/ trivial/ whatever I am. If you read the words, I know it's because you relate, somehow. If you take time to be here, it's because you are also me, somehow, and that is true whether you feel solace or judgment in response. Thank you for being that person, either way, because it makes me feel alive. Thank you for being a person, maybe, who offers to help, who says something, who comments, who is part of this. Because what I need, ultimately, is to feel not alone. I need to feel connected, to myself, to the earth, to the people around me, and every bit of that that I get helps. It makes me less bored. It elicits that firing of neurons that makes me someone alive, now, in this world. It makes me human.

That was my aside to say, thank you for being human with me. That is the one thing that happens semi-regularly that makes me feel alive in the exact way I am seeking.

And now, for my request. I need help.

I need to do something. And I don't know what it is.

I'm not asking for a job. I'm not asking to pass the time. I'm asking to move/ do/ learn/ be/ grow/ start. I am a firm believer in the cascade-- how you begin one thing and it can snowball into something lovely you never anticipated. I wish I knew what I were asking for. To kayak with you? To go on a backpacking trip? For you to teach me to knit? To volunteer with you? To have a job in your cafe? To do the writing for your blog? To draw the cartoons for your yoga teacher manual? (This one I've actually done...) I don't know what it is! I don't know what it is. But if there's a spot in your life that needs filling, or maybe even just a spot that has space somewhere near you, consider me.

I wish that could happen organically. But I have gotten too far away from it. I've thought too much and sat too long and fretted too much and now I'm sitting here with nails chewed down to the quick and a raging case of anxiety and what I need a spiritual awakening. 

I hope you understand when I say that. I think many people won't. I think whomever I'm hoping to reach with this will.

Everyone else is walking around summarizing their years in hopeful or resigned words, and all I can think is, whether tomorrow is the first of the year or a debatable decade or just a random Tuesday, I have got to switch shit up. I am dying inside. I feel like a polar bear trying to live in the Sahara. I feel like a butterfly trying to carry a piano. I am just not living right. I am not living who and how I’m supposed to be. I am fighting it and fighting it and have gone so long not doing or being whatever I’m supposed to do or be that I can’t even see straight. I need help.

And I will reiterate, again, this isn't about a job. I'm afraid people will respond and try to get me to do remote clerical work for them.

This is not that. 

Though I'm not sure exactly what it is.

All I know is, I keep saying that I'm lost here. 

But I'm not really. What I am is stripped bare enough of my routines and daily noise to step back and pay attention to how done I am with the life I've been living. 

When whatever transformation comes that I've been waiting for, I honestly don't think I'll look any different. I'll probably still live here. I might still be a stay-at-home mom. Maybe I still won't make any money. But I won't be bored. I won't have to pick the fight. Because I will feel all the ways in which I am valuable and interesting and engaged because I will be living them.

I just have to find out where to start.

If you know, if you know at all, please tell me.

And in the meantime, sorry Nic, for yelling at you about the underwear. It’s not about the underwear.

But also, please, pick them up.

on trusting.

We are looking for a space to rent in Santa Barbara. I knew, in coming here, it would be no small feat, but didn't quite realize how it would feel to be in it. With a budget of about $3000 a month at maximum, which could have bought me the house of my dreams in Louisville, we are most optimistically looking at a 2 bedroom apartment, or ideally a duplex or even a small stand alone home. It is bleak at best.

So far I've spent basically an entire calendar year looking at Craiglist/ Trulia/ Zillow postings and have gone to 6 showings. Two were laughably horrific. One was decent, but just joyless and in a questionable area. One was nice enough, but so close to the highway I could feel my ears ringing. Another one I loved the owner, wanted to talk with her and know her and have her know my babies, but with no closets and a terrible lay out, I had to admit the home itself, even with infinite charm, would make me nuts. And lastly, one of which I loved beyond all belief. It was perfect. 

That one I built a home in, in my mind. I mentally bought a new buffet table for the entryway. I planned for a cluster of our Adirondack chairs and a fire pit in the quaint outdoor area. I dreamed up the layout of the girls' bedroom, anchoring the down easy chair in the middle of the room so I could nurse and hold babies in the night. We could walk to my favorite ice cream shop, be at my parents' house in five minutes, and were close enough to the highway that Nic's commute would be a breeze. The landlord was bordering on curt but seemed mildly charmed by my humor. 

It felt so deeply right. My mom agreed.

And then, after several days of waiting to hear back, I received a clipped email, devoid of punctuation, that the place had been rented to another applicant.

I was crushed.

I've thought about this for days and days now. I keep thinking about that place.

And then suddenly it reminded me of Keven. 

Keven's greatest failing was that his name was spelled like a typo. Otherwise I found him supremely charismatic, interesting, and attractive. We met at Brass Tacks in San Francisco, a thousand years ago now, when my sister came into town for less than 48 hours. We went to some bars, and at this one in particular, I ended up in a dynamic conversation with the poorly named Keven. I was witty and drunk enough to feel beautiful. He was smart and engaging. We talked and talked. And then he left... with his date.

He had apparently been on a first date with someone who proved much less interesting to him than me, and she had been very interesting to my sister, so in true rom com fashion, we swapped partners and chatted the night away.

When the conversations had waned, like a gentleman, Keven escorted his date home. 

And then, like either the most ungentlemanly of gentleman or just perhaps like a true romantic, he had come back, immediately, to ask for my phone number.

In retrospect, I can't decide if it was charming or horrifying, but there was immediately and palpably enough between us that I was glad he had done so. Shortly thereafter, we went on our first date. I learned he was a Harvard graduate, a COO of an environmental policy company, and a lover of dogs. We drank good beer, laughed, ate an insane amount of food, and kissed, but just enough. It was easy and funny between us. It was smart and all just a little bit coy in a way that made me feel perfect.

We went on, oh, I don't know, a handful of dates and then he went to India for some reason or another. He last minute suggested I come along, which, of course, I could not. I was working two jobs and didn't even have a passport at the time, but how impossibly romantic the whole thing felt-- this smart and accomplished man-- for once not just a boy on a skateboard-- who felt so compelled by our connection to come back for me, to take me out to eat and drink nice things, to invite me to India. And plus, I just liked him. I liked to be with him.

I had not liked someone in so, so long. It felt exhilarating and fun. It felt easy. It felt right. I thought?

We exchanged emails the whole time he was gone— fervent, frequent, flirty emails. We went to a Giants game when he returned. 

And then, like too many love stories end, especially in San Francisco, he basically ghosted me. I learned he was also dating someone else, which is fine, which is to be expected early on. But I think, in essence, he chose her and instead of telling me directly, he let things uncomfortably and painfully peter out. At some point he acknowledged it, after some time and a shrewd yet kind email from me, and I felt resolved about the whole situation. It had its place in the unfolding of things.

Today was the day I saw the place I loved the owner but not the place. It only made me extra sad about the place I dreamed up our fire pit and buffet table. I had such a feeling of loss about it all.

I came home and kept thinking about Keven. Why did I keep thinking about Keven?

Because, I realized, he, too, had seemed right. And in the end, he wasn't, because he didn't choose me too. I don't harbor any ill will about it. It was a flicker in time in the scheme of things, but I did feel that same loss of so much potential, so much imagining of spontaneous international trips and drinking fine wines and saying endlessly witty things to each other. Maybe it could have been glorious. But it wasn't.

He wasn’t my guy because he wasn’t my guy. And just the same, this place wasn’t my place, because it wasn’t my place.

You can feel like all the parts of something are right, but if they don’t choose you too, they’re not right for every single reason which comes down to not wanting you too, to not being because it wasn't. 

After Keven, I dated someone pretty atrocious for a very short period of time. It feels unfair to say that about him now. He was kind, very kind, just not very smart or aware. He took me out, once, for an Italian dinner in North Beach, and then we went ice skating by the big Christmas tree in Union Square, because he knew I’d like both these things. He wanted to charm me.

He worshipped me, it seems, tried to tell me he loved me when it was far too soon to love me, when I asked him to please stop. 

And I thought about settling. Kind of. Definitely not really but fleetingly, kind of. How easy it would be to be loved by someone, whom I felt always in control of. That feels ugly to say, but it’s true. It would have been easy for my ego, for my fragile sense of self, to be with someone because they wanted to be with me.

But I knew it was wrong and I, having been so recently hurt by indirectness, told him clearly. I like you, but I no longer want to date you. I do not love you.

I kept wondering how you'd ever know. When it was right. Every person I'd dated seemed right for some reason and wrong for others. Keven had seemed so right, and yet, when I was honest with myself, I felt some need to impress him. Not in a hopeful maybe-I-can-always-be-my-best-self way of being with someone new, but because he seemed like more of an adult than I was. In retrospect, the least adult thing a person could do is not have the decency to let someone go directly, but in the midst of things, it felt that way, that I had somehow snuck into an echelon above me. And the ice skating boy was wrong in every way, but I tried for a while to tell myself he wasn't, because, shouldn't we all do something silly and easy and fun? And couldn't that just be love?

How would you ever know? How could you know?

I decided to give up. I decided I would really really never find someone to love.

A month or so later, I met Nic. A few months after that, I moved to Louisville. And now, six years later, we have two babies, a pretty darn sweet love story, and have come full circle back to California.

I don't think this is true for every love story, but it is for mine: I knew I loved Nic the minute I met him. I felt vulnerable and sweaty and imperfect and dumb and the most impossibly beautiful and seen of anyone in the entire world. He twirled me, and I KNEW. I knew. I knew. I knew.

Six years later, I am still getting to know him, to understand all of what that immediate, instinctual knowing meant, what I was looking for, how I needed him, how he has helped hone my life into something the most beautiful. I never could have pieced it all together then, but the instinct was there. Something deep in my gut and heart said, YES.

That didn't mean it was easy. We have had many many many hard times as a couple. We are still working out how to best communicate and understand each other, how to work as a team, how to not take things personally, how to separate our personal shit from our feelings about each other, how to allow them to coexist, how to physically coexist, how to co-parent, how to give and take. All of it. Our love required a cross country move, an extended period of time in a urine-soaked house with basically no furniture, and many hours spent navigating the weirdness of my giving up what was most dear to me: California, my family.

And yet, I knew.

I knew.

I knew because he was him. And in spite of, and also because of, all the problematic things, he chose me too.

I knew because I knew and he chose me too.

I didn't have to ask questions. When questions were asked, I still knew.

And so today, after being charmed by a house that I could make seem really right in my head that really wasn't right in reality, I remembered to listen to my gut and to say, that was not it. And even the house I loved so much was not it, because it didn't choose me back.

I feel like I've spent a lifetime second-guessing myself. I can easily overload myself with information and rationalizations. I seek input from others. When I'm looking for a certain kind of feedback, I unwittingly seek it from those, whom I know will say exactly what I want to hear. I sway my decisions accordingly. I get so deep in thinking and convincing and explanations that I lose what's so deep and yet so accessible within me: my instinct, my knowing.

I have to value that. And then I have to value the response too. I have to listen when I choose something or someone, and it doesn't choose me back. It's not confusing, it's not not obvious. The feeling we get from people and experiences is clear. Some things resonate. They feel clear and energizing and hopeful and right. Even if they're not easy. Some things deaden us. They feel exhausting and depleting and confusing. We have to justify, create caveats, excuse. Our heads know. Our bodies know. And we ignore it, because we want things to be right before they’re right.

This is all a very long way of saying, I haven't found us a home, yet. I have this sneaking part of me that insists I settle. That I live somewhere that feels not quite right, because it's insanely expensive and competitive to find somewhere to live here. So surely I would settle. But I keep reminding myself, my expectations are not absurd. I'm not asking to live somewhere huge or fancy or elaborate. I'm not asking to pay too little. I'm just asking for exactly what's right for me. 

And I refuse to make a choice out of fear or desperation. I won't let it confuse me. I am not scared. I will know when it's right, when it feels right, and when it chooses me too.

I'm so grateful for the shit that doesn't work out. I'm grateful for disappointment and fear and longing, because every time I've felt those things, I have also been able to look back and understand their place in the scheme of things. I am grateful that I'm beginning to know when I know, to trust that. It is not unclear, it is not hard to discern, it is not murky.

I know.

I know when I know.

And until then, I will keep looking, and waiting, and trusting.

Amen.

on sisters.

I originally wrote this article for a series online called This Book Belongs To. It was never published. Today, I realized it’s not about the book at all, but rather, sisters. How appropriately timed.

Somewhere in my first month postpartum, a package arrived unexpectedly at our door. It was from my sweet sister, Kate, who already has two children herself; there was a sentimental, motherly wisdom in that package that understood the benefit of frivolities during a time where so much was raw and pragmatic and, dare I say, boring. It contained the children's book, Life by Cynthia Rylant, a hand-printed onesie (that read "We really like each other," meant to match the t-shirts my partner and I had jokingly/ not jokingly made to wear early on in our romance when we were just that in love) and a pair of painfully cute, knit unicorn slippers. 

I cried immediately upon opening the package, mostly because, at that point, sunk in a fog of way-too-long undiagnosed postpartum depression, it was a reminder that the outside world existed, when I felt so very trapped between a seven pound newborn and my couch. How singular, timeless, shapeless, one's experience becomes with the arrival of a new baby; some, I think, relish it, while others, like myself, feel lost, like they are tumbling, amorphous, through it. This repurposed Amazon box felt like a tether to the outside world, a tiny lifeline. The onesie and slippers were, on my small girl, still gaping. The book, however, fit perfectly right away.

Life is the most simple story. It's a story about how life grows, how each creature relishes their habitat, their experience. It is filled with stunning landscapes and stoic animals and a quiet reverie that somehow captures both the magnitude and the smallness of life all at once. 

On one page, a deer watches a flock of birds scattering from a nearby tree, their cluster of bodies silhouetted against the night sky or stark against a glowing moon. The edges of the page are curling with foliage, the ground is covered with a grass that seems to dancing, moving, almost visibly pushing its way into the moonlight. The scene is all awash in shades of blue, so serene, yet so full of life. 

And the story reads, "All these [animals] know something about life: that everything is changing. And it is worth waking up in the morning to see what might happen." 

I have read this book no less than a hundred times at this point, and, without fail, by these pages, I cry, just like I cried the first time. I cry because, if I have learned anything about motherhood in the past 17 months of doing the darned best I can, it is that everything, indeed, is always changing.

Whatever good routines I think we've built-- those healthy eating habits or solid nap times or predictable moods/ schedules/ needs-- they often transform or straight up evaporate as quickly as I claim them as victories. Whatever traumas I think I've inflicted-- frozen waffles for dinner or very, very impatient words or, holy smokes, the time my daughter fell out of the sink onto the floor-- are erased from memory as soon as I claim them as insurmountable failings. Parenting is a constant practice in non attachment.

I have learned to, in a small way, look at life as a parent as a series of seasons. The uncomfortable and traumatic: it is changing. The triumphant and joyful: it is changing, too. But whatever the season, it really is worth waking up to find out what's next. If we can step back from it just the tiniest bit, take in just that moment, it can be really magical. It can also be horrifically boring/ exhausting/ trying. But either way it's okay. We keep moving.

I didn't really know that one month in. I didn't know when the package arrived, when I first read this book, but I had an inkling of it. I am sure that, in some ways, I barely know now. I have mothered, relatively speaking, a very short time, but long enough to know, I have no idea what's ahead, except that it will always be changing. But even though the journey of that discovery had only just, just begun when this book arrived at my doorstep, something about that page was comforting to me. It ripped me out of that very narrow moment in time; it said, You are a part of this. Part of the earth, part of the changes, part of the animals, living in their exact places, doing exactly what they are meant to do. In fact, I am one of them. 

I remember padding out to the car with my daughter where my partner stood, tinkering. I was clutching the book in my hands, weeping, insistent that I read it to him immediately. I needed to show him the contents of this package, my book. I needed him to see what my lifeline looked like, what it might look like to save me a little.

Life felt grounding at a time, when I felt dramatically untethered. It didn't fix anything, necessarily. I will still depressed. I still struggled in a huge way. But it did feel like a very real, very small moment of meditation, of solace. I am so grateful to my sister for knowing what I needed.

We haven't read Life much in the past few months. My daughter is old enough now that she prefers instead to flip through board books, herself, comfortably reclined in my lap, but always in charge of the pages at hand. But last night, after a week of everyone being sick, on a quiet day filled with grey skies and recovery, we huddled on the floor of her room and I chose the books, I turned the pages. 

I chose Life.

At 18 weeks pregnant, I needed the reminder. I am scared to have this baby, scared for labor to unfold like the first time, scared about my body recovering, scared to relive how dark the months following felt the first time, scared to figure out how to manage two small children. 

So I come back to the book. And it reminds me. "Life is not always easy. There will probably be a stretch of wilderness now and then. But wilderness eventually ends. And there is always a new road to take." I let that echo a minute. I cried. My daughter, curled up in my lap, so always appreciative of time spent reading together, yet so clearly sure which books she likes or dislikes, was oddly still. I believe there is a reverence to this book that translates, even to a toddler. She, too, knew.

Postpartum, this time around, it still might be a wilderness. We might get lost. Heck, much of life might be a wilderness. But I believe, deeply, in the simple, beautiful message of this book: we are a part of the natural cadence of things, and there is always something to love, even when it's hard.

I have started making a list for when baby two comes-- ways to cope, things that help, reminders that eventually, even if it doesn't get better, it changes. On my list so far is: exercise, mascara, sparkling water, yoga, Life, Kate.