The Messy Middle

What Nobody Tells You About Starting Over

Good Morning Sunshines. It’s been a hot minute but life’s been life-ing and I spent more time away from the screen when not working than in front of it writing, but as it always does, the pull to create, to write, and share is back.

Today is also a day of personal deep reflection for me. Seventeen years ago today, a doctor looked at me in Neuro ICU and said: “Welcome to the rest of your life.” I remember thinking: my life starts now.

It was Earth Day. I had just come out of brain surgery on a tumor that well, let’s just say time was ticking. That diagnosis had upended everything I thought I knew about how I was living, and I lay there full of something I can only describe as certainty. I was going to do something about this. I was going to build something clean and good and purposeful. I was going to choose differently, live differently, and my optimism, which has always been the most reliable thing about me, was going to carry me through.

I believed that completely. I still do, in the ways that matter. What I did not expect, seventeen years later, is the ache.

Here is what nobody tells you: you grieve the version of yourself you thought you'd be by now. Not who you were. Who you thought you were going to become.

I thought I would feel more settled by now. More arrived. So when the ache came, the deep, quiet ache that feels like failure even when it is not, I did not know what to do with it. Optimists are not supposed to feel this way. We are the ones who tell other people it is going to be okay.

It is still going to be okay. And also, some days, this is hard. That is not a contradiction. It took me a while to understand that.

I am 54. I built something I believe(d) in completely, from that diagnosis forward, into something I am truly proud of. Something that has had real impact on how people think about what they put on their bodies and in their lives. And then I had more surgeries, more diagnoses. A third tumor I am still living with. And somewhere in the middle of all of that I started asking questions I had not had time to ask before. Who am I outside of what I have built. What does my own next chapter look like. Not the professional one. The personal one. The one that is just mine.

I still get excited to show up every day for the brand and the industry I love. And I am also pressing seeds into April ground and not entirely sure what any of it will grow into.

The idea, somewhere in the back of my mind I did not examine often, was that eventually there would be a point where things felt solid, where the uncertainty had mostly sorted itself out and you were living in something like a conclusion. I did not think I would still be in the part of the story where I do not know what happens next.

But here is what I have learned about that version of myself, the settled and arrived one: she was not real. She was a projection. She was what I imagined stillness looked like from inside a very full life. And stillness, it turns out, is not the same as clarity. Clarity comes from moving through things, not from arriving somewhere.

I do not have clarity right now. What I have is this: the knowledge that I have been through harder parts of the story and come out the other side still choosing forward. That is not a small thing. It just does not feel triumphant. It feels like pressing seeds into cold ground and not knowing which ones will take (or in my case planting too early, like before the last frost, because I’m impatient even if I know better IYKYK).

If any of this sounds familiar, hi. I see you.

Maybe you are rebuilding after divorce, or after losing someone who held the shape of your life together. Maybe it was a career pivot, invited or not. Maybe the house went quiet and you realized you had been so focused on raising your kids that you are not entirely sure who you are outside of that. Maybe you just reached the age when you thought stability would finally be there and it is not quite what you imagined.

Whatever got you here, you are not behind. You are just in the middle. And the middle is where the actual work happens. The unglamorous kind that does not look like anything from the outside.

That is why I started The Indie Edit. Not to perform having it together. To find the people who do not either.

Seventeen years ago today, a doctor told me: welcome to the rest of your life.

I am still welcoming it. Even the parts that are harder than I thought they would be.

That has to count for something.

XxOo, Indie

PS If any of this sounds familiar…drop me a comment and follow, I’ll follow you back.