I began the day by saying I wasn’t in a rush, and it was the first time in weeks that I actually felt present. Present while drinking coffee, eating a croissant across from my husband, with the sun warming my back.
Life has been speeding too fast lately—flying by at a hundred miles per hour. The view from the windows is distorted and blurry, and I feel motion sick from trying to keep up.
If I’m honest with myself, this journey has been ongoing for years. It’s been persistently exhausting, and I’ve made it a regular part of my life.
I’ve normalised the hustle, the “it’s okay, it’s just for a short while.” I’ve relentlessly clung to the idea that I just need to reach some distant milestone to finally be okay—to thrive, to live, to be successful.
Sitting in that coffee shop this morning felt different. For the first time in a long while, I wasn’t just rewarding myself for completed tasks or experiencing something because I had earned it through hard work. I sat there feeling content and at peace, simply doing something I wanted to do. Simply enjoying coffee.
My body and nervous system didn’t feel under threat. I didn’t feel guilty or anxious about wasting time when I should have been working. There was no internal negotiation, no justification required.
I’ve been trying to understand what made this morning feel so different. And then I remembered this passage I came across last night from a Substack account I follow, milk and cookies:
“if you feel lost right now, i want to tell you something that i wish someone had told me: being lost doesn’t mean you’re broken. it doesn’t mean you’re behind. it doesn’t mean you’re doing life wrong. it just means you’re in a chapter where the answers haven’t arrived yet. and that’s okay. you don’t have to have all the answers to live a meaningful life. you just have to keep showing up for yourself in small ways — the walks, the journaling, the little rituals that remind you who you are.”
Reading those words was like being handed permission I didn’t know I needed. They led me to show up for myself today. It may have been brief, but it was real.
Tomorrow, I want to show up a little longer, stay a little deeper.
This isn’t about finding all the answers I’ve been desperately seeking; it’s about discovering that showing up, again and again, might be the answer itself.
