The Years We Spend Half-Alive

A personal excavation of meaning, purpose, and the homecoming of remembering.

I have been circling the same question lately. It follows me wherever I go like a quiet shadow. Never loud enough to demand attention, yet impossible to ignore.

What are we even doing here?

I don’t mean it in a dreamy, philosophical way.
I mean the lived reality of waking up, making coffee, answering messages, managing grief, trying to stay sane, aging in a body that often feels tired, caring for the people we love, and figuring out how to keep going in a world that rewards speed more than truth.

There’s a tug in the stomach some mornings that whispers, There has to be more than this.

Last weekend, I was talking with a friend who is about twenty-five years older than me. She hasn’t lived a sweeping life of adventure or reinvention. She reminds me of myself so much that I sometimes feel like I’m talking to a future version of me. She told me she has spent most of her life existing because that is what was required. Not living. Simply existing. Moving through days because they kept arriving.

Her words landed hard.
I’m forty-eight, and I’ve spent years feeling like I’ve been waiting for my life to start. While the days kept stacking, I floated through them as if they were a long hallway between birth and death.
I worked. I coped. I kept people safe. I tried to grow. I tried to heal. I tried to get better.
Yet beneath all of that effort was the faint sense that I have been hovering outside my own life, observing it instead of inhabiting it.

Putting that into words feels dramatic, but the feeling itself isn’t at all. It’s quiet. Steady. Old. A kind of restlessness shaped by years of trying to understand meaning inside a culture that treats purpose like a prize you earn if you work hard enough.

People love to talk about passion and purpose. They tell us to follow our gifts, pursue what lights us up, and build a life around the things that make our souls feel alive.
It’s comforting in theory, but not everyone is born into a life where exploration is possible.
Some of us grew up in homes that demanded survival over discovery.
Some of us spent years trying to get stable enough to even consider desire.
Some of us never learned how to chase anything because we were too busy trying to stay upright.

So we move quietly through decades, aware of an ache we can’t name.
A sense that we missed something.
A suspicion that we were supposed to feel more alive by now.

Everywhere we turn, we’re fed the idea that fulfillment is tied to external markers. Careers, passions, callings, gifts that shine brightly enough to be recognized. And when we don’t have neat answers, we assume we’re behind.
That something in us is lacking.
That we’re the only ones who didn’t figure out how to belong to our own life.

But what if the entire question is wrong?
What if the point was never about finding anything outside ourselves?
What if the point was remembering something we carried in with us?

Sometimes, when I get quiet enough, something in me feels ancient. Like my life stretches behind me, not just ahead. Like my soul has been here before and will be here again. I’m not sure if I believe in soul contracts or past lives or predetermined lessons, but I feel a tug in my body when I consider the possibility that we came here to remember something we’ve forgotten.

What if remembering is the purpose?
Not performing a perfect life.
Not proving ourselves to anyone.
Not chasing a single golden path.
Just remembering what we already came here with.

The forgetting starts early.
We learn how to behave. How to stay small. How to avoid drawing attention. How to fit into the expectations placed on us.
We learn to mistrust our instincts. To swallow truths that would disrupt the room. To mute intuition because someone once told us it was wrong. We learn to present a version of ourselves that keeps peace even when it cracks us open.

By the time we reach adulthood, so much of who we are has been trimmed, softened, or hidden. We learn to distrust our own instincts.
We swallow truths that feel inconvenient.
We silence intuition because someone once told us it was unreliable.
We drift into versions of ourselves that were never meant to carry the full weight of our souls.

And yet something inside never stops humming.
It shows up as longing, as grief, as déjà vu, as restlessness, as familiar aches we can’t name.
It nudges us through the places where we feel most alone.
It invites us toward the self we set aside.

My conversation with my friend stayed with me.
She said she had spent her entire life waiting. Like she kept her breath half-held, anticipating a moment that would make everything click.
I know that feeling too well.
I’ve spent years thinking there would be a turning point where everything aligned, where I’d feel certainty in my bones and finally step into the life that was “meant” for me.

Waiting shaped more of my life than any actual living.
A strange limbo where I kept searching the horizon for something that would name me.

It’s easy to assume we missed our chance.
Easy to believe the door appeared, and we were too distracted to walk through it.
But what if there was never a door to find?
What if the entrance has always been within us?

The more I sit with this, the more I sense that the purpose we keep trying to uncover isn’t something external at all. It’s the identity we buried.
Maybe that ache or emptiness we feel isn’t failure. Maybe it’s memory.
What if it is the soul reaching through the noise, saying, You’re drifting away from yourself. Come back.

I’ve started to see myself less as a blank slate and more as an archive.
Alive with the imprints of every version I’ve been. Made of instincts, ancestry, intuition, trauma, tenderness, and every story I’ve ever swallowed.
Remembering feels like the slow act of turning toward that archive, page by page.

It doesn’t happen in one sweeping moment. It arrives in pauses.
In the way your stomach softens after years of holding tight.
In the night, you finally tell the truth you’ve been avoiding.
In the person who feels familiar after five minutes.
In the way grief opens a door you didn’t know existed.
In the moment you realize your body has been speaking to you all along.

Remembering feels like an uncoiling.
At first, it’s uncomfortable.
It pulls the old stories up to the surface.
It asks you to look at the selves you abandoned.
It reveals places you’ve been living from fear rather than truth.

But as it deepens, something steadier begins to form.
A recognition that the life you’ve been searching for was never missing.
It was only buried.
And now you’re brushing the dirt away.

I’ve stopped assuming I’m lost.
Now I wonder if I’ve simply been layered.
Each version of me trying to protect the one beneath her.
Each experience adding another skin.
Each season asking for a new shape.

Remembering is the peeling back to reclaim the parts of myself that got muted along the way.

I don’t know if any of us are meant to discover a single purpose.
I think we are meant to come home to ourselves again and again until that home feels familiar.
Until the remembering becomes a way of living rather than a moment of insight.

Sometimes I think remembering might be the closest thing we have to freedom.
The quiet kind that grows from finally telling the truth after a lifetime of holding your breath.

A reminder that even when we feel like we’re standing outside our own lives, something inside us is still calling us home.

Love today,
Heather 🌸.