Fine, In Every Measurable Way

I sat down to write you this morning and had nothing.

Not nothing in the way writers describe when they want to seem deep. Nothing in the way of a woman with too many open tabs in her head, a coffee that has gone lukewarm, a list on her desk that she keeps adding to without crossing anything off, and the slow private knowing that the day was already half spent before she got to the thing that was supposed to be hers.

My new David Austin Rose in bloom

I opened the draft. I closed the draft. I opened it again.

This is the part nobody photographs.

There is a version of building something where every move feels purposeful and you sit down at the page with a quote already half formed and you wear a soft sweater and there is steam rising from a mug at a flattering angle. I have seen that version. I do not know who lives in it.

The version I have lived this morning, and most mornings of this chapter, is quieter and harder to describe. There is no breakdown. There is no breakthrough. There is just a woman at her desk who has been carrying a lot for a long time, who is still carrying it, and who promised herself she would show up here.

I am not going to tell you I have figured it out. I have not... yet. I am writing this in the middle of not knowing.

What I will tell you is this.

Overwhelm at 54 does not look the way it looked at 34. At 34 it was loud. It was the deadline and the tantrum (my toddler, not me) and the thing on fire. At 54 it is quiet. It is the layers. It is the fact that you are still the person other people lean on and you have not yet figured out who you get to lean on yourself. It is the cost of being competent. It is what happens when you have rebuilt enough times to know how long it actually takes, and you are doing it again anyway, with less of yourself to give.

It is also, on a Tuesday in June, very ordinary. That is what makes it hard to talk about. There is no headline. Nothing has fallen apart. The garden is coming to life. The dog is fine. The family is fine. I am, in every measurable way, fine.

I think a lot of us are walking around fine like this. The ones I write to certainly are. Accomplished. Capable. Carrying something that does not have a name yet, in a chapter that nobody briefed us on.

So I am not going to make this longer than it needs to be.

I sat down anyway. That is the entire story. I did not have anything to say and I sat down and I wrote you this. Not because it was beautiful. Not because I had a lesson. Because the act of showing up to the blank thing is the thing, especially when you cannot yet see the next move.

If you are reading this from inside your own version of a quiet, overwhelming Tuesday, I want you to know I am here too. I do not have it figured out. I am not one chapter ahead of you in the way that lets me hand you a map. I am one chapter ahead of you in the way that lets me sit on the bench next to you and say yes, this part is real, and you are not making it up, and you are not behind.

That is all I have today.

With love from Dragonfly Farm, Indie