Growth

All around me, I can see the unmistakable beauty in all the seasons that have passed, especially the really difficult ones. I can honor the one I am in. This is the season of my adult aloneness. The season of writing my first book. The season of goddess friendships and living in my body. The season of mothering and becoming an aunt. The season of my 39th year.

I’m sitting on the edge of my bed looking out at the bay, still in my work clothes. It’s Friday afternoon, Memorial Day weekend, and the sun is bouncing off all the roofs of the houses, the water, the docked boats bobbing in the bay. Even after living here for two years, the view still stuns me. The house sits on top of a steep row of houses, the highest on the street, and from this perch in my bedroom, the beauty is always so shocking I believe it washes away all that is wrong. How can a marriage break in the face of that view? How can there be any pain at all?

Three years ago today was my first Day 1. I woke up a hotel room that wasn’t mine, with someone I didn’t know, to text messages from my family asking where I was. I had left my little girl alone in a blackout. It was the night of my brother’s wedding.

We all chase things because we want to be happy, and often, because we want to be good. I chased all kinds of things trying to grab at happiness: boys, clothes, running, jobs, grad school, etc., etc., etc. forever.

The urgent thing was my life was actually falling apart in real, tangible and dangerous ways. But the more convincing thing was my heart’s withering cry; a knowing that it would actually be more painful to live and not wake up.

It has occurred to me that the thing I love most about running is HAVING RUN. It's also the thing I love most about writing, and telling the truth, and cleaning my bathrooms and mothering.

Today marks the first day of my New Life. The one where I don’t take the train to and from a job with a title and a paycheck and instead do the things that have been happening on the edges and stolen moments of my life for the past two years--writing here, writing my book, teaching yoga, and whatever else is coming that I don’t know about yet.

Last week I gave notice at my job. This May would have marked three years there—my title is Vice President, Marketing. Which means nothing except perhaps that I’ve put a lot of energy into work for fifteen years, the entirety of my “career.”