The Return

For the woman who has spent years making sure everyone else is okay … and cannot remember the last time someone asked if she was.

It's 9:45pm and the house is finally quiet.

Everyone's been fed, every message answered, every small fire put out. You pour the glass of wine that has become your routine. You look for the energy to get up from the table, but it’s not there. So you sit in the quiet … and feel exactly how far you've drifted from yourself.  In the quiet, your mind becomes louder. “Is this all that my life is now?”

Maybe you just got to work and you’re sitting in your car.  Engine off in the parking garage, giving yourself sixty more seconds before you walk in and become needed again. Maybe you cried in the car this morning. Again.  You've fixed your face in the visor mirror more times than you'd ever admit.

Maybe you’re in clinic (not your own personal providers, you’ve not seen them in years).  You know everyone’s meds and appointments by heart.  And then you realize that you feel different. Not sick, but also not well.  There's something your body keeps trying to tell you, but you don't stop to listen. Can’t stop.   We don’t have time to stop. 

I know what it’s like to exist in this space.  I know how this unease moves and how it can make you feel isolated.  In this space, I was lonely. But after years of recovery, I realize that I was never alone. Because I see it in the eyes and the behavior of the most badass and capable women I’ve known.

It doesn't arrive as a collapse (because you do have the luxury of falling apart).  It arrives as numbness. You stop wanting things. You snap at the people you love and then silently shame yourself afterward. You run your whole life on obligation and caffeine and the story that everyone needs you too much for you to ever put it down.

And the part you don't say out loud: somewhere in there, you started to resent it. The work. The people. The endless pull toward everyone but you. The resentment frightens you more than the exhaustion does because you no longer recognize the woman who feels it.

The Return is the work of coming back.

Not “self-care”. Not a long weekend that wears off by Tuesday morning. We go beneath the surface to the actual reason you keep abandoning yourself, and we change it where the decisions actually get made. So you stop bracing for Monday before Sunday dinner is even over. So you can sit with your child and actually listen to what they are saying, not mentally running the list. So you remember what it feels like to do things because you truly enjoy it and desire your own things for no reason other than that you want them.

So that when someone asks how you are, the true answer stops being "fine."

You will still be the woman who holds it all. You will just stop being the one thing in your life you refuse to hold.

The Return opens soon. I'm not sharing all of it yet.

But if you read this and felt caught in a way you weren't expecting, I want to know you were here.