A lot of you reached out after the last post.
You said you felt seen.
I sat with that for a while. Because sometimes the most powerful thing you can do for someone is just tell the truth about your own life and let them find themselves in it.
So thank you for that.
I had every intention of writing sooner. I had the next post outlined in my head, the words almost ready.
And then life swooped in. Like it does.
But this time, life didn’t swoop in with a crisis. It didn’t swoop in with an emergency, a 4 a.m. wake-up, or anything that needed managing.
This time, life swooped in with furniture.
Work asked us to stay home for the week. Not for anything dramatic. They were putting new furniture into our new space.
And I want to be honest about my first instinct.
It wasn’t gratitude. It was discomfort. Because the reason was so ordinary, furniture, that I almost felt silly letting it mean something. Like I needed a bigger excuse to slow down.
But somewhere in the middle of that first quiet morning, no commute, no rushing, nowhere I had to be, something in me exhaled.
Not just my body. Something deeper than that.
Like a part of me that had been holding on for a very long time, she finally loosened her grip.
I felt rested in a way I forgot was possible.
And I kept thinking about what so many of you said after the last post. I felt seen. Because I think what you were really saying is, “I am tired too.” I am holding it together too. And I didn’t know anyone else felt this way.
We are so many of us walking around carrying seasons that never fully ended. Survival modes that never got the memo that the storm had passed. Bodies that are still bracing even when the sun is out. And sometimes, not always, but sometimes, life will give you a week.
A quiet, unexpected, unplanned week where nobody needs anything from you and the only thing on the agenda is to just… be.
If that happens to you, I hope you let yourself have it.
I caught up on some things that I was working on, cleared my desk of clutter, and just felt productive. I sat in the morning without immediately reaching for my phone. I slept without an alarm. I let myself be a person instead of a function.
And I noticed something. The woman underneath all the managing and the showing up, she’s still there. A little quiet. A little out of practice. But there.
She likes the mornings when they’re slow. She has opinions about what she wants to eat. She laughs more easily when she’s not exhausted. She has things she wants to say that have nothing to do with taking care of anyone else. I missed her.
I’m not back to full yet. I don’t think one week fixes what years of running builds up. But I feel like I remembered something important. Rest is not a reward.
It is not something you earn after you’ve suffered enough or managed enough or proven enough. It is something you are allowed to have just because you are human.
And if life has to send you home for furniture to make it happen, maybe that’s okay, too.
xoxoxo
Meli Mel