I am sitting in the tub on a Sunday night. The water is hot enough to sting, but my body will not unclench. My chest feels weighted, my stomach jittery, my skin humming with a kind of restless heaviness that makes it hard to breathe. The steam curls up into the air, but nothing inside me softens. Then comes the voice I know too well: Who the hell do you think you are? You have bills to pay.
I press my head against the porcelain as if leaning back could quiet it, but the whisper always finds me. Sometimes at the grocery store, staring at the shelves with no memory of what I came for. Sometimes, in front of my computer, blinking cursor daring me to type. Sometimes, when I am doing something ordinary, like folding laundry, and suddenly I am hit with the hollow thud of not knowing where this life is supposed to go.
Three years ago, I quit my career without a real plan. I had been building other people’s dreams for years, managing, solving, and grinding. I wanted space. I wanted purpose. I thought walking away would deliver both. I thought I would meet my true self on the other side of the leap. Instead, I found perimenopause waiting with its chaos, and ADHD that suddenly bloomed into something fiercer, louder, harder to corral. I chase ideas with urgency and abandon them just as quickly. I pour myself into the book I know is inside me, pages spilling, momentum rising. Then two weeks pass, and I don’t touch it because something shiny catches my attention, or because I am convinced I will fail before I even begin.
This is 48. I did not expect to call this a midlife crisis, but maybe that is what it is. I feel closer to myself than ever before, yet I keep thinking this world was never built for people like me. The world rewards ladders and titles. I keep circling spirals and notebooks, looking for resonance instead of status.
There are days when I believe no one wants to hear what I have to say. That words will never be enough to support a life, that what I am building will crumble under the weight of bills and obligations. I still want my writing to matter. I want someone to stumble across a sentence of mine and feel seen, to pause for a breath they did not know they needed. That is the ache that keeps me here, even when the voice insists it is useless.
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It is hard to admit that I measure myself against a scale I do not believe in. I do not want my worth reduced to numbers, yet survival in this world often depends on them. I imagine moving into the woods, living small, painting and writing, and breathing in rhythm with the seasons, but even that requires money. Even simplicity has a price tag. And then the guilt arrives, sharp as a knife. How dare I complain when so many are without food or shelter, when my fear of survival plays out inside a house with running water and electricity?
I circle the question over and over. Does my privilege cancel out my pain, or is there space for both? Maybe the more human truth is that survival is complicated, and so is longing.
When I think about risk, it shows up in two clear pictures. Choosing this path means nights of terror about “not enough”, the pit in my stomach when I remember I am going to need a new roof soon, the way stress curls into my sleep and makes my body hum like a live wire. Not choosing this path means dragging myself back into the kind of work that feels like slow suffocation, waiting for years to pass while the truest parts of me rot away. Both pictures are hard to look at.
Recently, I said no to an income opportunity that would have made the voice happy. It was reasonable. It looked solid on paper. It would have paid a few bills. I almost said yes. But my body rebelled against it. I felt the familiar sinking in my chest, the dread of becoming what I already know I cannot be. So I said no, and the fear was instant. Still, under the fear was something else. A strange kind of relief. Like I had taken one small step toward honoring the lostness instead of betraying it.
Maybe this is what being lost is supposed to mean. Not a mistake or failure, but a threshold. A waiting room between the life I already know how to survive and the life I am still learning how to live.
There are days when I want to run from this lostness, to scramble for control, to demand clarity. And then there are nights when I sit still enough to notice that being lost is its own kind of prayer. It strips me down. It reminds me that my life is not a product to optimize, but something alive, mysterious, unfinished.
I think about how much of my life has been spent gripping control like it was oxygen. Planning, fixing, managing, smoothing everything out so no one would know how disoriented I really was. To honor being lost means unclenching. It means trusting what I cannot yet see.
And maybe that is the invitation of this season. Not to solve or to arrive, but to stay. To live in the waiting room with both fear and faith. To believe that simplicity will come, that resonance will come, that the gift of trust will keep showing up in small ways, even here.
I don't know who I am. I do not know if I will ever wrangle this restless brain or make peace with the voice that hisses about bills and failure. I do not know if the words I scatter will ever be enough to stitch together a life.
But I know this: I am not turning back.
I have spent too many years abandoning myself in the name of security, contorting into shapes that kept everyone else comfortable while my own soul starved. I have lived the slow death of fitting in. I will not do it again.
Lost is not the opposite of living. Lost is the strange terrain where living begins. It is the wilderness where the old maps burn and the new ones have not yet appeared. It is terrifying, yes. But it can also be amazing.
And if all I can do this morning is sit here, heavy and restless, answering the voice that doubts me with nothing but breath, then maybe breath itself is the proof. Maybe breath itself is the first step of beginning again.
Love today,
Heather 🌸
If you’ve ever found yourself in this in-between place—half unraveling, half beginning again—I’d love to hear from you. Share this piece with someone who might need it, or leave a comment below so we can be a little less lost together.
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