I Scheduled Everything Except the Point

You picked up your phone. Not for any reason. Just because the quiet was too loud.

You scrolled. Instagram. Then email. Then back to Instagram. A recipe you’ll never make. A trip you’ll bookmark for later. A woman your age doing something that made you feel slightly behind on something you haven’t decided you want yet.

You weren’t looking for anything. You were just — not sitting with it. Whatever it is.

You spent forty years trying to be everything for everyone else. And when it stopped being required, you found out you didn’t know how to be anything for yourself.

That sentence probably just landed somewhere uncomfortable. Good. It landed somewhere uncomfortable for me too, the first time I let myself think it.

Here is what those forty years looked like, in case yours resembles mine:

When the kids were small, it was being present enough when you were home and productive enough when you were working and neither of those things ever felt like enough at the same time. With your husband, it was showing up — really showing up — in the margins of everything else. With your friends, it was staying connected across busy years, doing enough, being enough, remembering birthdays and showing up in crisis and keeping the thread alive. With your body, it was trying to be healthy enough to keep going at the pace the whole thing required. And underneath all of it, a career that needed you to be excellent — visibly, measurably excellent — while you handed your best thinking to other people’s problems before you ever turned it toward your own.

There were never enough minutes. You knew that. You made peace with it. You told yourself this was just the season.

And then the season ended. And you picked up your phone.

In January, I built a schedule.

Not a loose outline. A schedule. Minute by minute, 7:30am to 10:40pm, every day accounted for. (Believe it or not, this is just Tuesday’s schedule)

I built this because I am a builder. Because when something feels broken, I make a system for it. Because I had read that routine was what you needed in retirement, and I was going to do retirement correctly if it killed me.

The schedule would have worked. The house would have been clean. I would have been in better shape. Every box checked by 10:40pm.

I knew, even as I was building it, that none of that was the thing I was actually looking for.

I was trying to solve for contentment. For purpose. And I had built a spreadsheet that had a column for everything except those two things.

I don’t think you’re lazy. I don’t think you’re lost. I don’t think you’re ungrateful for the freedom you have — the freedom you earned, the freedom you sometimes feel guilty about having when the rest of the world is still in the middle of their busy.

I think you’re someone who spent so long being useful that you forgot usefulness was supposed to be a means, not the point.

I think you got very good at performing for the stands — at being visible, legible, needed — and now the stands are empty, and you don’t quite know what to do with your hands.

I think the phone helps. Until it doesn’t.

I spent forty years trying to be everything for everyone else. And when it stopped being required, I found out I didn't know how to be anything for myself.

You’re not behind. You’re just starting something that doesn’t have a syllabus.

If you’re figuring this out too — I’d rather do it together than alone.

When did you first realize that staying busy and feeling purposeful were not the same thing?

If this landed somewhere true for you — share it with a woman who needs to read it. And come back next Monday. We’re just getting started. 🌿