The Day I Stopped Waiting for My Life to Begin

Hello, hello.

Not that long ago I felt like my world was collapsing around me. Not all at once. Slowly. Quietly. A fairy-like tip toe that felt like I was going to be swallowed whole by the universe at any moment.

It was like watching the tide pull away from the shore, taking pieces of my identity with it and then forming a giant tsunami. Actually this is a recurring dream I’ve had since I was a child, but I’ll save that subconscious analysis for another day.

It was around February 2024 and the life I had spent years building no longer existed in the way I had imagined it would. There was a something I like to call a threshold moment. You know the ones…they change the way you move forward with your life after a single action changes you.

The future I thought I was walking toward suddenly disappeared virtually overnight.

There were mornings when I would wake up and spend a few disoriented seconds trying to remember where I was. Then reality would return. My marriage was over. My family looked very different since my daughter left to live in Australia. My career felt really uncertain. Everything familiar had been rearranged. This fancy spiral of a shit show unfolded for the best part of two years.

I wasn’t just grieving the life I’d lost.
I was grieving the woman I thought I was.

For a long time, I kept asking the same questions.

How do I manifest my way back to myself? How am I going to feel inspired again?

I meditated, I visualized, I prayed. I looked for signs. I drank a lot of wine in the winter of 2024. When I say “a lot” I can never do more than one glass.

I tried to think more positively. Truly, I wanted certainty before I took another step because I was terrified.

Instead, something much quieter happened.

Almost without noticing...I started writing again. It was flowing out of me. Especially since I wrote Dear Universe 365 in 2024, I was ready to write again.

Not because I had a publishing deal or a deadline or because I knew where it would lead. I wrote because it was the only place I still recognized myself.

And then something extraordinary happened. It wasn’t my circumstances that changed first.

It was me.