Momentum Was Never Yours to Lose

Yesterday I was standing in the middle of our vegetable garden, hose in my hand. I don’t know what happened but this space somehow turned into an absolute wild jungle this summer while I wasn’t looking. Like the kind you have to climb through now, pushing past tomato vines and squash gone feral just to reach the back rows.

The sky had finally cleared. For days the wildfire smoke had sat on everything, and that morning it had finally lifted, and I stood there breathing in a way I hadn’t thought to be grateful for until now. Just clean air and my own two lungs, and who thinks about the air they breathe until they can't breathe it.

Across the yard the sprinkler was running on my dahlias, which are entirely their own separate operation, and my phone was in my pocket, not for scrolling, for the little timer I’d set, because lord knows I’ve walked off and left that sprinkler going for hours more times than I’ll admit and half-drowned the bed before.

Two watering situations going at once, one of me, one wildly ADHD brain. I’m the kind of person who sets an alarm and then stands there when it goes off wondering what on earth I set it for. So now I set a timer and let it tick like a tiny but necessary babysitter.

That ticking timer was the only reason the phone was on me at all. It buzzed against my leg, and when I fished it out with dirt under my nails, I saw a text from a friend of mine.

I met her at a retreat where, by design, nobody was allowed to talk about what they did for a living, so the two of us spent days together with no idea who the other one was out in the real world, just talking late into the night about this ache we both kept circling, the pull to become relaxed women, to slow down, neither of us knowing yet that the other had a whole career she’d have to slow down from.

I read it twice, and then I read it again, standing there in the dirt with the hose still running over my feet. She’d just walked away from something she’d poured herself into for a lonnnnngg time. Like, she set it all the way down at what some would call the top of her game.

Standing there in the overgrowth of my garden with the sprinkler still going and the bees working the row beside me, a smile spread on my face. As I watered the sunflower that suspiciously showed up in our garden this year (I seriously do not remember planting that thing) my mind started to move like it does when I’m moving slower.

I don't know why my mind went where it went after I fired back a response that started with OMG and ended in about six exclamation points, but there I was thinking about an entirely different message I got a while back. Let me explain so this makes sense.

This message landed when I was sitting at my desk, camera on for another podcast interview. I frantically turned my camera off before my next guest hopped on, changing shirts to make it look like it was a different day than my previous interview (I can now laugh at this, but my office was like a fashion war zone on recording days!)

This message came through as a voice memo from a man in the industry, easy and complimentary the way these asks always are. Hey, just checking in, hope you’re doing so well, we’re putting this event together and you were the first person we thought of, you’re our first pick, we couldn’t imagine doing it without you, no pressure at all if you’re slammed or busy with the kids.

Of course there was no speaker’s fee attached, I’d be paid in pure exposure. I’d get in front of their giant audience and how lucky would I be to get that opportunity. What they needed, though it took me a minute to see it, was a relatable mom to be on the ads, speak at their event and soften the room for the women they were trying to reach. They needed me far more than I needed them.

Five minutes after the voice text landed, another friend of mine messaged to ask if I’d gotten a message too, and underneath she’d pasted hers, and it was the same as mine. Word for word. The same hey, the same you’re our first pick, the same we couldn’t imagine it without you. It was sent to her exactly the way it had been sent to me.

Something dropped in my stomach, I stared at my phone with my mouth open, my jaw tightening before I even had the words for why. The con turned over in my hands like a coin and I clearly saw the underside of it. There was no “one” pick. The special being presented was mass-produced.

You’ve probably gotten this message before. Maybe never from a marketer, maybe never as a voice memo, but you know what it feels like to see the con happening right before your eyes. The way something arrives dressed as a compliment with a need sewn into the lining.

The boss who says you’re the only one who can hold the team together, so you take the extra weight with no raise attached, or the party everyone just assumes you’ll host, or the committee that can’t run without you. We all have our own version of this.

The ask always sounds like being chosen, and somewhere inside it your worth gets stitched to your usefulness. And damn, it always feels good to feel needed, to feel special, to feel like there’s a space that only we can fill.

Let me slow down here, because it would be way too easy to make this a story with a villain, and the man who sent that memo isn’t one. He wasn’t sitting there twirling his mustache, he was doing what he’d learned works, reaching for the woman who’d soften the room, because the machine pats him on the head every time he does it and it works.

I swear I’m not building a case against men, some of the ones I love most are out here planting gardens and rocking babies at three in the morning. There are great men out there and men who have been taught a system that has worked for them (and if it ain’t broke, why would they try to fix it, right?)

What I’m after is the machine behind the men, hungry and old, running on our open hands, feeding on all of us since long before we got here, the men caught in its gears the same as we are.

And I don’t get to stand outside this and point my unmanicured fingers, because for years I said yes to those rooms with my own mouth. Looking back I was one of the machine’s most devoted workers. Nobody had pinned my foot to the gas, I pinned it there myself, white-knuckling it all.

And if you’re reading this and thinking you’ve done the same, it’s time to realize that you were never the problem, you were just handed a story so early and so often it stopped sounding like a story and started sounding like fact.

It’s the one that tells us that opportunity is a train through the station once kind of thing, and if you don’t leap onto the car, you’ll be left on the platform watching it pull away for good, leaving you in the dust. And who wants to be left behind?

The funny thing is I’ve never once heard a man worry about losing momentum. I’ve watched men fumble and flame out and disappear for years and come back to a standing ovation for the sheer nerve of returning and reinventing themselves. They show up, we clap and call it a comeback, and we love him more for it.

We got handed an entirely different story.

Women get chosen. Men get comebacks.

One of those you wait for, hoping you’ll be picked. The other, you decide you’re having it.

So what do we do? Well, we keep our hands open. We say yes to the shiny opportunity built for someone else’s success because what if this is the one, the meet cute, the big break we’ll tell our grandkids about someday. We imagine the before and after transformation we can share on the internet and write the whole story in our head before the word “yes” escapes our mouths.

All the while, we’re filling our calendar around everyone else’s requests and needs and the work we are truly dreaming about, the stuff with our own name on it stays folded in a drawer, going absolutely nowhere without us, reserved for when more time miraculously decides to show up. Ha.

I’ve watched women’s lives be planned around others for as long as I can remember. Heck, I did it myself in pursuit of “having it all.”

Flashback to my early entrepreneurial days, I was a Midwest wedding photographer booked and busy. Being in the Midwest meant that April through October I was basically gone every weekend and January through March went still.

So when Drew and I decided we finally wanted to grow our family and have a baby, I couldn’t just want a baby, I had to engineer the whole thing. I had a narrow three month window to get pregnant so I’d clear the first trimester before the busy season, deliver in the quiet months, take a leave nobody was paying me for, and be back before the next couple booked.

I was literally trying to schedule the most tender, least controllable thing a body can do around strangers’ wedding dates, and I didn’t even think to question it, that was just the arithmetic of being a woman with a business and a body and a hope all at the same time.

I lost the first baby at ten weeks, far enough in that I’d already started to believe, and then there was nothing for me to do but wait a full painful year for that window to come around again. I spent that year lifting my camera to other women on the best day of their lives, all that white, all that beginning, while my own body was still letting go of something I had already started to love.

Then, the following year, I got pregnant again. This would surely be the redemption story, this would be the miracle I could post and proclaim and celebrate. After hearing the heartbeat and writing a new story for us as a family, I lost that one at ten weeks too, right at the edge of what the world calls clear.

And there I found myself, waiting once again. There’s a specific kind of loneliness to grieving on a deadline, to mourning something with one eye on the calendar, and it does something to a woman, it teaches her body that even her sorrow is supposed to be efficient.

The clock is real. There are windows that close, and I won’t stand on the far side of my two daughters and pretend otherwise. But in all that waiting, I watched the culture take that one narrow true ticking thing and press it flat across everything.

The clock was ticking on the wrinkles on my face, my relevance, my worth, the tick going until it felt like every door in the building was closing at the same moment, like slowing down for grief, for healing, for a body that needed a year, would cost me the entire race.

The lie was never the clock. The lie is that everything is a clock.

And what I couldn’t see from inside the waiting is that the waiting was never empty. Something was being planted in me down there in the dark, in the exact season I was so sure I was falling behind.

And tucked underneath even that was the oldest fear of all, the one I’ve only recently been able to say out loud, that if I stopped being useful, I’d stop being loved. That deep planted belief that my worth and my output were the same thing, and if the output slowed, the worth would drain right out with it, and I’d look up one day to find that without the doing, there was no reason left to keep me.

The following year when I finally held onto a pregnancy, when she stayed, I did what scared me more than any no I’d ever managed. I opened my calendar for the coming year and blacked the entire year out. No travel, no commitments, twelve months with nothing for anyone else on them, and one promise to myself, that I’d say yes only to what felt right when it arrived, and not one minute sooner.

I didn’t know it then, but that blank calendar was the first vote I ever cast for a different kind of life, one where rest comes at the beginning instead of waiting at the end like a prize you never quite reach.

And then I braced. Because a nervous system that’s run in overdrive for a decade doesn’t just exhale on command, it waits for the bill to come due, for the evidence to show up that the ground has dropped out from under me and I had made an awful, terrible mistake.

For weeks I waited to be forgotten, waited to feel the momentum drain through the floorboards, waited for the punishment I was so sure was coming. It never came. The work I’d planted held, the people who were mine stayed mine, and nothing (and I mean nothing) I loved got taken away.

Week by week I stood right on the edge of the discomfort that slowing down handed me. It was this long slow unclenching that my body had almost forgotten how to do, until one afternoon it dropped all the way in, oh, wow, I can slow down and still be here, I can take my foot off the gas and trust that I won’t forget where it is.

I've got two women in my head on this, and they stand at opposite ends of the very same question.

There’s one woman who says the quiet part out loud, that balance is a myth and total bullshit, and that if you want to win at this level you better outwork everyone and pay for it in the parts of your life that go dark while you climb, (and I hate to say it but she isn’t wrong, if the game is built to reward output above all else., she’s telling you exactly how to beat the house.)

The other one asks what your life might look like if you let yourself be as relaxed as the average unremarkable man. I laughed the first time I read it, and then I sat with it and it stopped me cold, because I could picture him instantly. Feet up in the recliner, remote in hand, not one thought in his head about whether he's earned this, nobody in the house acting like he owes them an explanation.

I conjured that type of man in approximately half a second. And then I tried to picture a woman doing the exact same thing, and I couldn't do it without also picturing the list of everything she'd finished first.

I lived at the first woman’s end for almost a decade. I ran flat out, built all of it, a show that reached a hundred million downloads, a life with little balance and every cost, and for all intents and purposes I won. Looking back now it’s wildly clear that my body kept the receipts for all of that winning in ways I’m still paying down.

Then I walked to the other end, pulled back to a fraction of the noise, and kept nearly all of what I’d built, which makes me a full blown walking contradiction of what the first woman swears is impossible and the second one has spent her life trying to prove.

So where does it leave me? Well, it leaves me setting my microphone down at what felt like the height of my career… and the funny thing is I didn’t even hit pause at a nice round number. I did it at the most random number a human can land on. Nine hundred and sixty eight episodes in and ten years of my voice in strangers’ ears on their commutes and their kitchen floors, and deep in my bones I knew that I was finished.

Still the old voice started up in the dark, if you stop now they forget you, you don’t come back from walking away, who even are you without the show. There were a dozen easy roads where I kept my foot down out of fear alone, and I chose none of them, because over the top of all that noise sat a steadiness I can only call knowing and I chose the knowing, and I haven’t once wanted it back.

Now the part I can’t leave out, the one that keeps me truly honest is that I know some of you are reading this in your own white-knuckle stage, not because you love the gas but because rent’s due and the kids are hungry and the job doesn’t care how tired you are, and slowing down isn’t a choice sitting on the table, it’s a thing other women get to do.

I see you, and I’m not going to stand here in my garden and tell you to let go and walk away from what’s keeping your family fed. But here’s the truest reason I stopped. I got the chance to slow down, and once I saw that I had it, I decided I had to take it, because somebody has to go first and show it’s real and that it’s possible. Someone has to stand on the other side of the fear and say the water’s fine, it can actually be done.

And even now in the busy, I don’t believe it’s hopeless. There’s something you can do from right where you’re standing. The scarcity story doesn’t only take your paid yeses, it takes the free ones too, the unpaid extra you’re so good at that nobody thinks to stop asking, and all the rooms you keep warming for people who wouldn’t do the same for you. More often than you’d let yourself believe, those are yeses you can hand back even when you can’t yet touch the paying job.

You might not get to lift your foot off the whole road, not today, not with what’s riding on you. But there’s your own foot on that gas, and then there’s the one that’s been pressing down on top of it all this time, and once you feel the difference between the weight that’s yours and the weight that was never yours to carry, you can’t unfeel it. That’s not freedom yet. But it’s exactly where mine began.

Which brings me back to my friend, and to me in the garden yesterday with the water running across the yard, reading her text one more time. Her message said this…

And she wanted me to know she understood exactly why I’d landed on her path when I did, and that she was following me into becoming an even more relaxed woman. She signed off the way she always does. I love you, friend.

I’m the wise woman in that text. I still can’t totally believe it, because not that long ago I was the one white-knuckling the wheel, and here’s a woman I met when neither of us knew what the other one did calling me the proof it really can be done. That’s the whole thing, isn’t it?

You go first, and it’s not because you’ve got it figured out, but because somebody has to stand on the far side and wave the next one across.

And so there I was, standing in the dirt and smiling. This, all of this, the whole overgrown joyful mess of it, was everything I wanted to text her back and couldn't fold into a simple reply. So I took a photo of me in the garden, makeup free, a basket full of fresh eggs and peace on my face and sent it to her.

I was lucky to have slowed down enough to see that the gas pedal was only ever a synthetic high, the kind that leaves you reaching for the next one before you’ve finished the last, dressed up as ambition, always promising an arrival that moves further off the faster you chase it. I was literally living proof that the day you finally ease off it and trust yourself, the strangest gift shows up, the view.

You lift your head and suddenly realize that there’s a life out there you’d been driving too fast to see, and when you slow down enough to put your face right down into what’s already growing, the same green you’d been flooring it past for years, you finally learn the one truth the machine was built to keep you from finding out.

Fast was never better. It was only ever louder.

And so here’s what I actually want to tell you about the lie that is momentum. That I can hit the brake and trust myself to remember exactly where the gas is. That momentum was never handed to me by somebody else deciding I was worth handing it to, it’s mine to create when I want it, mine to start and mine to slow right back down. That easing off isn’t a death sentence, it never was.

I don’t believe in the train anymore, the one that roars through the station once and leaves you behind if you miss it.

My life today is proof. The wild garden, the dahlias that aren’t even open yet, still tight green fists on the stems, all that color folded up inside them waiting on a clock that isn’t mine to rush, and any gardener will tell you the waiting is the part that matters most.

The waiting is the part you can’t skip or hurry or hustle, you just keep showing up with the water and you trust what’s in there to come when it’s ready.

Nothing I’ve planted in love has ever left me.

It was all just waiting for me to slow down long enough to see it.

About the Author:

Hi, I’m Jenna. I write from the woods in northern Minnesota, where I live with my husband, our two girls, a handful of chickens, and a garden that gets bigger every single summer. I wrote a New York Times bestseller and talked into a microphone for ten years, and then I stopped, and now I'm writing again the way I actually like to, loosely, as the thoughts come, without a plan for what it's supposed to become.

If any of this landed, I write here most weeks about slowing down, unlearning the stories we were handed, and what actually grows when you stop rushing it. I’d love for you to sit and stay with me awhile.