Welcome to Sacred Musings, a space where I share reflections from the heart on love, life, caregiving, and the lessons that shape us into who we are. My hope is that these words bring comfort, perspective, and inspiration to anyone walking their own path of healing and growth.
Sacred Musings
For the past two weeks, ever since my black walnut spiritual bath, I have been observing myself. Watching my thoughts. Paying attention to my impulses. Sitting with a realization that initially felt like a slap in the face.
No one is coming to save me.
There is no big moment waiting around the corner. No husband whose arrival will make everything make sense. No great friendship that will finally give me the belonging I have been looking for. No crescendo where all the pieces come together and my life becomes the life I thought it was supposed to be.
There is just my life.
And I am beginning to wonder how much of it I have spent trying to create that moment.
Buying homes. Starting jobs. Entering relationships. Starting businesses. Accumulating debt. Always reaching for something that might finally feel like arrival.
Each new beginning carried a possibility: Maybe this will be it.
Maybe this will be the thing that makes me feel settled. Important. Chosen. Maybe this will give my life a meaning I will no longer have to question.
Some of those choices brought good things. Some brought problems I am still working through. Looking at them now, I have to ask myself how often I was choosing something because I wanted the actual life that came with it—and how often I wanted the moment I imagined it would give me.
The announcement. The recognition. The feeling that I had finally become somebody.
That is uncomfortable to admit.
I think about a Facebook cancer support group I joined. I posted my picture and shared my story. It was a beautiful picture of me, and I had shared something personal. Maybe five people liked it.
Other people’s posts received hundreds of reactions. Long conversations unfolded beneath their pictures. People seemed to gather around them.
I noticed.
I told myself perhaps it was the picture. Perhaps I needed to participate more. So I engaged some more, and the experience felt much the same.
I have felt that in other groups, too. Sometimes in person. That feeling of being present without quite becoming someone people move toward.
I do not necessarily think people dislike me. But I have wondered whether I have whatever it is that makes people attach to someone. And when you have spent years hoping to find your people, that is a painful question to sit with.
I know that patients appreciate me as their nurse. I feel useful there. I know how to show up, how to care, how to help someone through a difficult moment.
Outside of that role, I have often felt less certain of my place.
The response to a photograph cannot answer the question of who I am. Still, it showed me how much I wanted a response. How much I wanted someone to see me and stay a while.
I am allowing myself to acknowledge that without pretending it did not hurt.
But something else is happening alongside the hurt.
I am getting tired of making my life audition for significance.
I do not have to become a big-time business owner. I do not have to build a hospice empire, become a millionaire, or turn running into another measure of whether I am doing enough. I can pursue things I care about without asking them to justify my existence.
I can also stop. Reconsider. Choose something smaller.
I can be the girl in apartment 405.
I can be my son’s mom.
I can go to work, care for my patients, come home, and have an evening that produces nothing worth announcing.
When I first thought, I can be nobody, it sounded harsh. But underneath those words was a possibility I had rarely given myself: I could live without becoming widely admired, endlessly accomplished, or especially memorable to strangers.
I could have a private, ordinary life and allow it to be mine.
I am still learning how to accept that. Part of me still wants the big moment. Part of me still looks around to see who noticed.
But I am beginning to understand that my life is whatever I make of the days I actually have. I want to be more careful with those days. More careful about what I take on, what I owe, and what I expect a new beginning to do for me.
No one is coming to live this life for me.
And perhaps I am finally ready to stop waiting for the scene where it all becomes something else.
Tonight, I can be the girl in apartment 405.
There is a life here, too.
