😮‍💨 I ghosted you. Turns out I needed to.

The Short & Sweet

This past Saturday morning all I wanted was to stay in my pajamas, make something warm, and write. Not because I had to, but because I really wanted to. Because the version of me who gets to just sit and be creative and let her thoughts breathe has been really hard to find lately.

Instead, I found myself getting ready to go be a daughter (which I love), but that's not quite what I was looking forward to on my day off.

The last few weeks have been a lot. Not in a dramatic, everything-is-falling-apart way, but in the way life sometimes gets when it decides to really just give you the most. Work got heavier. The body kept asking for things. The calendar kept filling with meetings, events, and appointments. And somewhere in the middle of all of it I lost the thread back to myself 😬

I kept calling it exhaustion, but my therapist clarified that what I was was drained. Depleted. There's a difference. Exhausted means you used the fuel. Depleted means the tank is empty (including the emergency reserves).

That one sat with me for days. And in my next therapy session, I admitted something that filled me with guilt and embarrassment: I want time to build my life.

Not to be a great employee. Not to be a present daughter or a thoughtful sister or a good partner or a consistent creator. Just... time to breathe life into me. To spend a Saturday morning in my pajamas writing something I care about. To clean my house because I want it to feel like home (not because I'm stuck in it). A few months ago my therapist literally told me I needed to leave the state (or at minimum, leave the house). Get somewhere different. Let my nervous system remember there's a world outside of these walls and this to-do list. Weeks later I still haven't done it.

The guilt of wanting something for yourself when you've spent your whole life being someone other people need. For a lot of us, especially if you're an eldest daughter, a first-gen kid, someone who learned early that the family runs partly on your shoulders, rest was never really an option. Being tired wasn't something you were allowed to say out loud, because too many people depended on you to keep going. So you kept going. And eventually keeping going became so familiar it started to feel like comfort. Like identity.

The survivalist in me (the one who finds comfort in the chaos because the chaos is known) kept me going through a lot of hard things. I'm grateful for her. But she doesn't get to be the only voice anymore.

I ghosted you because life wouldn’t stop long enough for me to write about it. It still hasn’t. But here I am anyway.

I'm still figuring it out. The rest, the recharge, the leaving the state. But I'm in it. And if you're in a season where the roles are loud and the self is quiet, I just want you to know you're not the only one.

Aquí estoy. Right here, three weeks late, shoulders tense, working on it with you.