41

What It Costs to Finally Come Home to Yourself

I deep-cleaned before I moved in.

Not because the place was dirty. Because I didn’t want to build on top of someone else’s residue. I wanted to start fresh. I needed that, maybe more than I realized at the time.

My bed hadn’t arrived yet, so I slept on my couch that first night. I had chosen to live alone for a while. That sentence still surprises me a little when I say it out loud. I lay there in the quiet of a space that was entirely mine and tried to figure out what I was feeling. It took me a while to find the words for it. Relief came to mind first, then grief.

Not the clean, uncomplicated kind. The kind that feels like being brought up from underwater. You’re gasping and grateful and glad to be alive, but you’re still in wet, soggy clothes, and you have no idea where you are.

I’ve been sitting with that image for a while now. The baptism of it. Something ended, and something else began, and I wasn’t entirely sure yet which one I was mourning and which one I was celebrating. Probably both and at the same time.

I’m turning 41 on the 16th, and it feels a lot like that, breaking free of darkness and walking straight into blinding light. Finally free and disoriented, grateful and scared all at once in the same body…all on the same couch.

I spent most of my thirties trying to be chosen. Not consciously. I didn’t wake up and decide to make myself smaller, more accommodating, or easier to love. It happened the way most things happen: gradually, then all at once. I wanted to be loved so badly that I confused acceptance with love, and I stayed in spaces that were never built for the fullest version of me.

I’m not angry at every person from that season. But I am honest about the cost. The years and the energy I poured into a version of myself, I kept adjusting so someone else would feel more comfortable. There is a grief in performing for other people while the authentic you dies over and over. It is also the kind that people don’t understand because they say, “You chose it” or “You decided to do X, Y, Z.” So you hold it all in. It slowly shows up as fatigue, inflammation, and chronic illness, and eventually withdrawal from everything you know because no one feels safe, and everyone causes insult to injury.

That grief is strange because it shows up in the most inopportune moments. In the middle of a workday. In the car after a good therapy sesh. At 11 o’clock, when the apartment is quiet, and you realize you are finally not bracing for anything. You should be happy, and you are to an extent, but not fully.

That grief is real. I’m not rushing past it. People used to tell me in my younger days that I was so resilient. I wouldn’t care if I never heard that again. I didn’t know what to do other than keep going. I didn’t know any better, and nobody cared anyway.

41 landed me squarely where 31 wasn’t quite stable enough to be. Mature and becoming unf*ckwitable. Yes, it’s a word.

As a society, we have a preoccupation with youth that I find exhausting. jennifer talks about this in a really honest post (you can read it here). “Age” is treated like a pass to determine who is worthy of experiencing the fullness of life. Like as you age, the best of you is behind you, and everything from here is just decline. I don’t believe that. Not even a little. I have reinvented myself so many times. Every single day, I become a more refined version of the woman who existed the day before. The woman writing this sentence is the newest version of me that has ever existed.

HumanOS, if you will, and updated daily. I’m still working out some kinks, but actively being patched.

41 feels somewhat calmer than I expected. Freer. Still frustrated that it took this long to get here, yes. Still yearning for the community I haven’t fully found yet. Still wanting the relationship where I am cherished and wanted in the way I always deserved. Still in the middle of an IVF journey that is expensive and uncertain, and the most intentional thing I have ever chosen for myself.

Still in wet clothes, if I’m honest. But they’re starting to dry.

I am going into Round 2 with a clearer sense of who I am doing this for and why.

Not to prove anything to anyone who didn’t believe in me. Not to fill something that was missing. Not to check a box on a timeline I built a long time ago, when I thought life moved in a straight line.

I want to be a mama because I have love to give that deserves a secure home. I want to break something open in my lineage that has been closed for too long. Because I believe I can offer a child something I didn’t always have: the experience of being someone’s first choice and not a consequence to be managed. Not an inconvenience. A first, deliberate, unwavering choice to be wanted.

And somewhere in the process of deciding that, I realized it applied to me, too.

You are the only person who has to live your life. Every decision you make, every step you take, should be with you in mind. Not you only. You first.

That is not a selfish sentence. It took me 41 years to believe that. And I still go back and forth about whether or not this is the SMART choice. Right now, it is the one my heart wants. And let’s be clear. There are many pathways to motherhood. Right now, I am exploring my way. I will explore others when the situation and timing lead me that way.

So here I am. On the other side of a first night on a couch that felt like the death of something I knew and the beginning of something I don’t yet fully recognize. Still figuring out which parts of the wet clothes are worth keeping and which ones I need to leave on the floor. Still asking hard questions about what I want my life to look like and who deserves to be in it.

Scared and hopeful. Not the frilly kind of hopeful. The kind that has been through something real and chose to keep going anyway.

Maybe that is resilience after all. I guess I’ll allow it.

But this time I’m doing it for me first. And that changes everything.

I finally get to exhale. And so do you.