Present Over Perfect

terror.
Getting older means we start to look at our own lives and
our own selves the same way we love our partners, our
children. When I see Aaron, I see the same eyes I’ve been
looking into for more than fifteen years, the same mouth
that kissed me first in my parents’ garage and a million
times since then, each one a brick in the foundation of our
life together.
What do you need to burn down in your life, to make
space for a new way of living? What commitments,
expectations, roles, structures seem immovable until you
start to move them, and find that when you do, everything
changes?
In my case, to a certain extent, I followed the path that
made sense, that unfolded naturally. I held everyone
together, because I always had; only now I had a husband
and two kids to hold together, too. I worked and worked
and pushed and pushed, because that’s what I knew how to
do.
And now, instead of hiding in busyness and
codependence and pretending that everything’s okay, when
I live in the silence, it makes me brave. I feel uninsulated,
unarmed, and it makes me bold. Because for the first time in
a long time, I’m listening to my own voice and desires; I’m
articulating my own vision for my life.
Addiction to motion—or faking or busyness or obsessive
eating or obsessive dieting or whatever it is for you—builds
just a tiny, luscious buffer between you and . . . everything.