Reverence in a King Sized Bed

 A couple of weeks after my birthday bank in May, I was lying in bed doing absolutely nothing.

It was Saturday morning, my coffee in one hand, my phone in the other, Dexter asleep somewhere in the room. I wasn't journaling or meditating or trying to have some profound moment. If I'm being completely honest, I’m pretty sure I was scrolling Instagram.

And then I noticed something... I was laying right in the middle of my king-size bed.

Which sounds like a completely ridiculous thing to notice.

Except I couldn't stop thinking about it!

Because even after almost 17 years of being divorced, I had always slept on one side of my bed. The same side, actually. I never decided that there was any other side other than my side of the bed and I never thought about it at all. That's just where I always slept.

And now somehow I had migrated into the middle.

I actually laughed when I realized it because, seriously, how did it take me seventeen years to use the whole fucking bed?

At first I thought I was probably making too much out of it. It's a bed. Maybe I moved because I was comfortable. Maybe the mattress dips differently. Maybe after seventeen years I finally realized there's no reason to reach across three feet of mattress for my phone.

But I kept thinking about it.

A couple of weeks before that morning, I had turned 49.

Forty-nine!

Still insane.

I got married at 19, so when I look back at my life, I tend to divide it into these very distinct periods. There was the girl I was before I got married, although I was barely an adult then. I was basically a kid. I didn't become an adult and then get married. I became an adult inside my marriage. Then I became someone completely different after my divorce.

There were all the years I was married and raising my boys. And then there's this entire life I've lived since my divorce that somehow has lasted almost two decades.

That's the part that gets me.

Seventeen years is a long fucking time people!

My kids grew up during those years. I rebuilt my finances and my career. I started Karmic Currency. I wrote a book. I watched relationships and friendships come into my life and disappear from it. I took care of my mom and then had to learn how to live in a world where she wasn't here anymore. I fell in love again when I really wasn't sure that was something I even needed anymore. And this year, I bought a house.

My house!

I still love saying that.

Because there were years when I couldn't have imagined being here.

I remember what it felt like after my divorce when everything was uncertain and I was raising two boys and trying to rebuild financially at the same time. I remember the foreclosure. The Bankruptcy. I remember being stressed about money and skipping paying things and waking up in the middle of the night doing math in my head because I genuinely didn't know how I was going to make everything work.

And what's funny is that during those same years, I was building a career in banking.

So I could sit across from someone all day and talk intelligently about money and strategy and risk and then go home and worry about my own financial life.

Life is funny like that, you can be very competent and still be scared.

You can know exactly what you're doing professionally and have absolutely no idea what you're doing personally! Like we say in Spanish “En casa de herrero, cuchillo de palo” basically it means that sometimes the person who is the expert at something, or does something professionally for everyone else, doesn’t have their own shit together in that exact area at home.

Like a contractor whose own house is falling apart, a hairstylist with roots overdue, or a financial expert avoiding her own budget.

Anyway, I think I spent a lot of those years assuming that eventually I would get to that somewhere place where everything would finally feel settled.

I just didn't know where or when that somewhere was because there was always something else I was working toward.

And I don't even mean that negatively. I love having ambition! I like building things. I'm probably always going to have another project because that's who I am. Like when I bought this house and within five minutes I was mentally renovating half of it, so clearly we're not pretending I've suddenly become some woman who sits quietly under a tree appreciating the breeze all day in an existential state of Italian “dolce far niente.” Which means “the sweetness of doing nothing.” Although I’ve contemplated getting that as my next tattoo, but anyway- I digress.

That's not happening, but something definitely has changed.

So back to that morning, laying there, I wasn't thinking about what I needed to accomplish next.

I was thinking about what was already around me.

I was in the house I bought by myself! My kids were doing well. I was in a healthy relationship with someone I love. I had people in my life who genuinely cared about me. The house was quiet, Dexter and the cats were asleep in la dolce vita, lol and there was nothing I needed to solve at that exact moment.

I remember thinking, wow, I'm finally happy.

And then almost immediately correcting myself.

No. That's not quite it.

Because of course I'm happy, but there was something else underneath it.

I thought maybe I was excited?

Nope, That wasn't right either..

Excitement has this anticipation to it, like you're leaning toward something that's about to happen.

But I wasn't leaning. I was just there. And I think the closest word I have for it is reverence.

Because I remember looking around and having this very clear feeling of, wait, I prayed for this!

Maybe not this exact house or this exact morning. I certainly wasn't sitting around fifteen years ago requesting a specific floor plan from God, despite all the manifesting books saying you should have that level of detail.

But I meant the feeling of it!

The safety, The calm and being able to exhale in peace.

Having my children be okay enough that I don't have to spend every waking minute worrying about them.

Being loved without feeling like I have to disappear inside the relationship.

Having a home that’s mine.

Those were the things I wanted, they were all feelings.

And somehow, while I was busy living and working and grieving and rebuilding and worrying about what came next, they happened.

I think that's why this chapter feels so different to me.

For most of my life I was always looking toward whatever was coming. Even when things were good, part of my brain was already somewhere else.

What do we do next?

What do I need to fix?

What's the plan?

And I don't feel that urgency right now.

Of course there are absolutely things I still want. There are places I want to travel too and things I want to create and work I still want to do. I have no intention of spending the rest of my life sitting in my bedroom admiring my accomplishments.

But I don't feel like I'm waiting for any of those things before I allow myself to enjoy my life.

And that's new.

And I think that's also why I've become incredibly protective of what I have around me.

My circle has gotten much smaller over the years.

Some of that happened naturally. People move on, lives change, fall-outs are inevitable and the friendships that made perfect sense at 35 don't always make sense anymore at 49.

Then there were the weird endings and those are always interesting.

The friendships you thought were solid until suddenly they weren't. The people you assumed would always be there, somehow became people you don't speak to anymore…

There was a time when those endings really bothered me and I wanted to understand what happened and whether I had done something wrong, or whether I should have tried harder.

Well, I don't spend nearly as much time doing that anymore.

I pay more attention to who is actually still here.

And maybe that's why I've become a little stingier with access to me. Actually, a lot stingier!

I joke that this chapter is VIP only, but I'm also kind of serious.

I'm not looking for a bunch of new friends. I don't need everybody to know everything that's happening in my life. I don't need to be everywhere I'm invited, and I don't feel badly anymore when I decide that something or someone simply isn't for me.

I have one friend who calls me a bitch all the time!

She's joking, and I know she's joking, but lately I've noticed it bothers me more than it used to.

Because I'm really not.

I'm selective.

I have boundaries.

And I know what happens to me when I spend too much time around negativity or drama or people who are constantly bringing chaos into the room. I feel it. It stays with me. Then I'm irritated or depleted and wondering why I gave something access to me that I already knew I didn't want.

At this point, why would I keep doing that?

Especially now.

That's probably the part I've become unapologetic about.

I don't want to spend this next chapter recovering from people.

I want to live it.

And when I went back to thinking about the bed, I realized maybe that's why laying in the middle felt like such a big deal.

For seventeen years, I had an entire king-size bed and somehow stayed on one side of it.

Maybe there was some part of me that was still accustomed to leaving room.

I don't even know who I was leaving it for.

Maybe nobody, maybe one a special somebody.

Maybe it was just habit.

But I started wondering where else I had done that. Where else had I made myself a little smaller without realizing it? Where had I left room for somebody else's comfort, somebody else's opinion, or some future version of my life when the life I had was already mine?

And that's when the whole thing started making sense to me.

I feel like I'm finally giving myself permission to fully be her.

I don't even know if I can explain exactly who "her" is actually.

Because she's just me.

But maybe me without all the editing…

Me without automatically moving over.

Me without feeling like I need to justify why I don't want something around me or why I want more room or why I've decided that my peace matters more than somebody else's opinion of me! And yes, apparently me taking up the middle of the fucking king-size bed.

I think that's why turning 49 has stayed with me more than I expected.

I thought I would be thinking about getting older. Instead I've been thinking about how much of my life I finally feel present for.

There's still more coming. I know that for sure & stay tuned! WinkWink!

It’s just that I just don't feel like I need to run toward it anymore.

That morning my coffee eventually got cold. Dexter was still literally snoring under my bed. And I had probably been lying there thinking about all of this for much longer than necessary, which is also very on brand for me.

But I also remember looking at the amount of bed I was taking up and smiling.

Seventeen years.

It took me seventeen years to move into the middle.

I don't know why it took that long.

Maybe some things just take the time they take…