I’m back at the airport. Different one, opposite direction, same tired carry-on. This time I’m flying toward the ranch and bringing home a version of me that a trip to Indiana rearranged a little.
See, I wrote you a letter on the way out here. I never sent it.
There was no wifi on the plane, and then I landed and the days closed over my head the way they do when you go home for something that matters. That letter was all about getting ready. About how I prepare now before I walk into something hard. I had it all figured out, sitting at thirty thousand feet, calm and prepared and full of love and good intentions.
Then I lived the four days. And I’d rather tell you what actually held.
I was home as a daughter and a sister. There for something worth celebrating, and home for the quieter, harder things underneath it. There is a complicated truth to my personal life these days but the stories aren’t only mine to tell. So forgive my ambiguity for now.
I now know this: A room can hold a cake and a heartbreak on the same afternoon. If you’ve lived long enough, you probably know life can be like that.
We spent the days at my brother and his wife’s beautiful cottage on Lamb Lake, tucked down in the southern part of the state on acres and acres of green. Sycamores and hickory trees. Still water. The kind of quiet that makes you notice how loud your regular life has been. That forest gave us somewhere soft to have the hard conversations, and somewhere beautiful to sit inside the ache of the things I can’t put here yet.
Mostly it was slow. Long mornings, longer tables. My siblings and my mother and me in similar rooms that we’ve always been in, just older now, carrying more. Our stepdad Jim was turning eighty. It was a joy to make a fuss over him the way you should when someone you love turns eighty. The rest of it was unhurried and close, and that was the gift, because it let me actually be there for it. The sweetness and the grief both.
So here’s what worked.
The meditations held. They’re from Spirit Daughter, on her app Moment. The one thing her guided meditations teach me is that I can tell my own body it’s safe even when things feel confusing or uncertain. They are what I turned to most prior to my trip and a few times while I was there. These allow me to meet the day already steady instead of chasing calm all afternoon.
The walks held. I took the long way through the days every single time, even when I was tired, especially when I was tired. Nature asks nothing of you. After consecutive days of mental and physical heaviness, that was its own kind of medicine.
And yes, the little arsenal held too. A Relax Good Patch is boring in the best way. You stick it on your wrist and it works to relieve stress for up to twelve hours. (The calming core is ashwagandha, passionflower, and rhodiola. It also carries L-theanine, GABA, ginger root, black pepper extract, CoQ10, magnesium, and B vitamins.)
Alice Mushrooms - functional mushroom dark chocolate squares - went in my carry on. I reached for them a few times.
A mixed berry calming powder was mixed into my water one night.
None of it is a miracle. All of it was just a way of staying in my body instead of leaving it, which is the only thing I ever really wanted for many years from an alcoholic drink and never once got. (If you’re new here I’m almost one year sober.) This new, healthier approach to coping is leading the charge on my healing journey.
That’s the part I keep circling, somewhere over the middle of the country, watching Indiana go small behind me.
The old me would have managed this return trip home sprinkled with worry and difficult circumstances with something that numbed them. Blue Moons used to be the go-to. A homemade spicy margarita was a close second. I’d have come back to California foggy, behind, a little ashamed. This time I came home tired, but clear. Present for the hard parts and the sweet ones both.
Greg was beside me through all of it, the way he is. I felt loved. I felt steady. And I felt more grateful than I know how to say that I get to move through a season like this one, a season that is testing me in ways I won’t pretend it isn’t, as the woman I am now instead of the one I used to be.
Because that’s the thing I keep landing on. Tending to myself like this was never about willpower. It was love. And the love doesn’t stop at me. When I’m steady, there’s more of me for the people who need me. My mother. My siblings. The man next to me on this flight. The version of me they get now is softer and stronger than the one who used to white-knuckle through and call it coping. I’m proud of her. I don’t say that about myself very often. This time I mean it.
The seatbelt sign is off. We’ll be descending soon.
Whatever your difficult days look like, the visit, the conversation you couldn’t avoid, the stretch that asks everything of you, I can tell you the tools you tend to yourself with beforehand are the same ones that carry you through. Not perfectly. But enough. Enough to stay awake for your own life, even the hardest parts of it. This is where the practice comes into play and when it works, it feels like a quiet win.
I’m almost home. I’m bringing all of myself back with me.
With love from the ranch,
Catt
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