(the more they stay the same)

I am writing this from the closet – an actual closet, not a figurative closet. I first started hanging out in my closet about a year ago. I don’t know what initially made me do it, but I was immediately drawn in by the coziness and the quiet, the way the small space seemed to embrace me and make me feel safe. It was a mess at the time, a stuffed catch-all for boxes that had never gotten unpacked, old photos and journals and mementos, craft supplies, personal care and beauty supplies, and -for some reason – a headboard and footboard that never got put back on our bed when we moved in in 2018. But still I sat in there, vowing to eventually clean it out and turn it into a dedicated meditation room.

I started the project this January, working a little bit each day until I had it the way I wanted it. When I tell you it is now my favorite place in the house, I mean it. By a very large margin. I start my day in there every morning … thinking, meditating, praying, doing yoga, stretching, listening to music, and depending on the day -writing, playing on my phone, or watching a movie. It’s the only place in the house that is 100% mine, and it is sacred.

It was during one of my morning Closet Think Sessions that I admitted to myself how much I missed writing. How much I missed putting my jumbled thoughts and emotions into words. How much I missed connecting with others. I gently blew the cobwebs off my blog, and almost laughed when I saw what my last post was (almost exactly a year ago!). I stopped writing for a whole plethora of reasons, most of which I won’t get into here, but one of them was that I felt like it had gotten so negative, and I didn’t like that. But because my life is one big example of irony, the situation I wrote about in my last post? Not only still going on, but absolutely worse than ever. I don’t know what to do.

And still, life goes on.

I recently saw a meme (which I’ll have to paraphrase, because I lost it somewhere in the great abyss that exists between the desire to screenshot it and the act of actually following through) that talks about the mental and emotional work that takes place in the second half of your life. It explained how the first half of your life was about developing coping strategies to survive, and the second half was about discovering your way (and yourself!) as you unlearned and relearned, peeling apart the layers of why you are the way you are, what you want to keep, and what you need to release. It’s not so much a midlife crisis as it is a rebirth.

It turns out that rebirths are painful. Liberating & empowering, absolutely, but also incredibly painful. The amount of gut-wrenching realizations I’ve made in the past year could fill a whole FLEET of closets. It’s exhausting. It’s terrifying. It takes 150% of my engery on any given day.

So if you’ve been wondering where I’ve been the past year, this serves as your answer. I’ve been in my closet. Contemplating life. Breaking wide open and then rebuilding. The span of time between my 50th and 51st birthdays has been one of the hardest of my life, and somehow one of the most rewarding. I feel like me, like that shy and sensitive and scared little girl who was never supported in the way she deserved … and also like someone who is brand-new, figuring it all out, finding her own way after so very many decades of living for everyone else.

Today, I crawl out of my 357 days of hibernation, ready to tackle what comes next.

Welcome back.