Style & Serenity

I’ve spent a lot of this new chapter trying to find my purpose.

I’ve asked myself, over and over, what I’m supposed to be doing now. When the answer didn’t come, I turned on myself. Why haven’t I figured this out yet? What’s wrong with me?

Lately I’ve started to wonder if I’ve been asking the wrong question.

For me, connection has never been extra. It’s like oxygen. I can go without a plan for a while. I can’t go long without people.

I keep thinking about what it means to be human. Animals live in herds and packs. They stay close for safety and warmth, and we do that too. But we need more than warmth. We need to be known.

We need someone who remembers the story we told last month. Someone who hears what we didn’t say. Someone who laughs at the same thing at the same moment.

A day can be full of tasks and still feel empty if nobody really saw us in it.

Maybe I’m the only one who feels this way. I doubt it.

A lot of women reach a new chapter and get told to look inward. Heal, grow, reinvent. There’s value in that. But some of us won’t find ourselves alone in a room with a journal.

We find ourselves across a table from someone. In a phone call that runs long. In a friendship that picks right back up after years apart.

I think I’ve been treating purpose as something I have to earn before I’m allowed to enjoy my life. As if the long dinners and the long calls were a reward for figuring things out, instead of part of the answer.

So this is what I’m giving myself permission to do now. Stop waiting. Call the friend. Make the plan. Stay a little longer when the conversation is good.

Who makes you feel most like yourself? Tell me in the comments. And if this one stayed with you, subscribe below so the next one finds you.

People call it a midlife crisis.

I’ve never liked the word. A crisis sounds like a sports car, or a sudden haircut, or someone leaving.

What I feel is closer to homesickness.

The strange kind, where you’re homesick standing in your own kitchen.

The house is still the house. Same rooms, same windows. But it’s quieter now, and I hear the quiet the way you hear a clock after it stops.

My mother is gone. My father is gone.

With them went the two people who knew me first. There are questions I never thought to ask them, and now I can’t.

That’s homesickness too. Missing a place you can’t go back to, because the place was a person.

My daughter is in college now. For most of her life, she wanted to be wherever I was.

Now I’m the one who wants to be near, and the calls are shorter. It breaks my heart every time.

Maybe that’s the hardest kind of homesickness. The person is still here. I hear her voice whenever she has a minute. But the place she used to be, close enough to need me, is somewhere I can’t go back to.

I won’t pretend I’m fine. I’m not, not yet.

The life I built everything around has changed shape, and I’m still working out where things go. I’m heartbroken. I’m also proud of her. Both are true.

I keep reaching for things that aren’t where I left them.

Nobody warned me about this part. That you can miss a time while you’re still living in the years that came after it.

The cure for homesickness has always been the same. You learn the new place slowly, street by street, until one day it starts to feel like yours.

I’m still learning this one. But I’m learning it.

Have you ever felt homesick without going anywhere? Tell me in the comments. And if this one stayed with you, subscribe below so the next one finds you.

My friend Christine just moved into a new condo, and for her housewarming she invited the people who have known her the longest: family, old friends, and a handful of us who once worked with her in a newsroom.

This condo is Christine’s fresh start. The last few years were hard on her, and she picked herself up and built a good life on her own terms. I’m proud of her. She’s an inspiration to me.

I left that job when my daughter was born, about twenty years ago. A few of the people in that room I still see now and then. Some I hadn’t seen since.

There was no warming up. It was easy right away, the way it is with family, as if we had never been apart.

I think that’s because we grew up together. We were young in that job, and we went through a lot side by side. Now we’re in different places and different stages of life. None of that came into the room.

What surprised me was how close I felt to people I barely knew back then. We had shared a newsroom and not much more. That night we talked like old friends. Maybe the years you spend in the same place count for something, even if you didn’t spend them talking.

At one point we all lined up on Christine’s staircase for a picture, one or two of us per step, leaning on the banister.

Later someone held a phone out for a selfie and nobody stood still. It came out blurry, half of us mid-laugh.

From a pedestal in the corner, a pumpkin with a carved old man’s face watched the whole thing.

I came home grateful. Every person in that room has been through something hard, and every one of them came through it strong. I admire them for that. Being around them reminds me I can be strong too, and that there’s a good life still ahead of me.

I’m glad that after all this time, there’s still a room where we fit.

Who are the people who knew you before? When did you last see them?