“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.” ~Carl Jung

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I stopped drinking ten months ago. It’s the longest I’ve ever gone. I’ve been thinking a lot about what finally made me stop because the truth is, I loved drinking. I really did.

Drinking was such a big part of my life. It was part of growing up, part of my Irish culture, part of friendships, celebrations, dinners, weddings, birthdays. It was just what we did. I started drinking when I was probably thirteen or fourteen, so I don’t really know much of my life without it.

And for a long time, I genuinely enjoyed it.

But eventually the pain of drinking became greater than the joy of it.

I still loved the idea of drinking, but I absolutely hated how I felt afterward.

The mornings were becoming unbearable. Waking up with anxiety, trying to remember what had happened the night before. Wondering what I’d said, what I’d done, whether I’d embarrassed myself. Sometimes not wanting to hear anything about the night because I was too afraid of what someone might tell me.

The blackouts were happening way more often, and that was probably one of the worst parts. Being at a party or a dinner, apparently having a great time, and waking up the next day with little or no memory of it. And then pretending I remembered.

Someone would mention something from the night before, and I’d laugh or go along with it as though I knew exactly what they were talking about. In reality, I had absolutely no recollection.

It’s a horrible feeling.

And the anxiety and shame that came with it would sometimes stay with me for days.

When I look back now, I see so many occasions that should have been wonderful memories. Weddings, birthdays, evenings with friends, parties at our house. And instead, I remember how drunk I got, or I don’t remember much of the night at all.

That’s a sad thing to admit.

I read something after I stopped drinking about keeping a “burn journal,” basically writing down the experiences you never want to repeat. The mornings you felt awful, the things you regretted, the times you weren’t the person you wanted to be.

I think there’s something to that. Not to keep beating yourself up over the past, because God knows there’s enough shame already, but because it’s so easy to forget how bad things had become. You start remembering the fun of drinking and not the aftermath.

And I think that’s where I finally got to.

The fun just wasn’t worth it anymore.

I couldn’t keep waking up feeling the way I did. I was tired of disappointing myself, tired of the anxiety, tired of wondering what had happened the night before.

I just couldn’t keep doing it.

One of the harder things I’ve come to realize since stopping is that I had a completely different perception of how much everyone else drank.

I honestly thought that when I was getting wasted, everyone else was too. That we were all drinking the same amount and having the same experience. And somehow that made it feel more acceptable to me.

But now that I’m sober and still going to dinners and parties and spending time with friends, I can see that wasn’t really the case.

Most people weren’t drinking the way I was.

It was me.

And that’s been quite difficult to come to terms with.

Because now I wonder how many times I was the person people talked about after a party. We’ve all had those conversations when someone gets really drunk, and the next day people say, “Oh my God, she was wasted.”

And I think back now and realize that was probably me more often than I would ever have wanted to believe.

There’s shame in admitting that, but there’s also something important about being able to see it for what it was rather than continuing to convince myself that everyone was doing the same thing.

Even little things around the house have made me realize how much drinking was really mine.

We have a drinks fridge, and it used to be full of beer, wine coolers, all sorts of alcohol. I always thought of it as something my partner and I stocked together.

Now I look in there, and it’s mostly sparkling water and non-alcoholic beer.

And I realize that maybe it wasn’t really both of us drinking all that alcohol. A lot of it was me.

It’s funny how stopping something can make you see your life so differently.

Another big reason I wanted to stop was my children.

I think about my daughter, who is eighteen, and my son, who is eleven, and the example I want to set for them. I don’t want them remembering their mom being drunk or seeing me in a state where I wasn’t really myself.

More importantly, I want them to feel safe with me.

I’ve thought about nights when I’d had so much to drink that I was passed out, and what would have happened if one of them had needed me. What if there had been a car accident in the middle of the night? What if there had been a fire or some other emergency?

Would I have been able to get up and help them? No.

That’s a really uncomfortable thing to ask myself as a mother.

I want them to know that I’m there, that they can call me at any hour, that I’m capable of helping them if something goes wrong.

My son has been so proud of me for stopping, more than anyone else. I think he understands that this has been a big change for me. Sometimes I don’t think other people necessarily realize how much goes into it, especially when drinking has been part of your life for so long.

But I also know that everyone is dealing with their own things, and that there are people struggling far more than I am. I don’t see my ten months as something that makes me better or stronger than anyone else. It’s simply something I’ve been trying to do for a very long time, and so far, I’ve managed to keep going.

And I hope I continue.

The other thing I’ve been thinking about is how much your relationships and your life change when you stop drinking.

Because they do.

I’m not quite the same person I was before.

When I drank, I was much more easygoing. I would go along with things, stay out longer, say yes to things I probably wouldn’t have otherwise. I was more social, more spontaneous, maybe more fun in some ways.

Now I find myself questioning things more. I don’t necessarily want to go out all the time. I don’t have the same enthusiasm for sitting around for hours while everyone drinks. And sometimes I feel a bit left out.

Not because anyone is deliberately leaving me out, but because the dynamic has changed. When everyone is drinking and you’re not, you’re just not experiencing the evening in quite the same way.

And I do wonder sometimes whether people find me less fun now.

Maybe they do. I don’t really know how my partner is feeling about this change. Sometimes I think he wishes I still drank….

I can understand that because I’ve been on the other side of it. Maybe it’s the Irish in me, but I remember hearing people say, “You can’t trust someone who doesn’t drink.” Drinkers don’t really want non-drinkers around watching and judging, but I don’t judge. In my case, I wish I could have a drink and that one drink would be enough, but it’s never just one. Too bad for me.

I think it’s also changed the way I see some of my friendships and even my marriage. Not necessarily in a bad way, but things are different, and I’m still trying to understand what that means.

There’s a part of me that misses how easy everything seemed when I was drinking. How simple it was to go along with whatever was happening. But then I remind myself that it wasn’t actually that simple, because I was the one waking up the next morning feeling terrible.

And I don’t miss that at all.

What I find interesting now is how much I want to be on my own.

I love being home. I love my own company. I’m genuinely happy having a quiet evening, doing my own thing, and not feeling that I have to be somewhere or be doing something.

I don’t know whether that’s because I’m getting older, because I’ve stopped drinking, or a combination of both.

But I’m enjoying it.

And I think part of it is that I’m trying to figure out who I actually am without alcohol.

That’s a strange thing to say at this stage of my life, but it’s true.

I’ve been drinking since I was a young teenager. It’s been part of almost every stage of my life, so I don’t really know what my adult life looks like without it.

What do I actually enjoy doing?

What do I want to spend my time on?

What kind of social life do I want?

Do I genuinely enjoy some of the things I used to do, or did I enjoy them because drinking was involved?

I don’t have the answers to those questions yet.

And maybe that’s why I want more time on my own. I need a bit of space to think about those things without feeling I have to immediately replace drinking with something else.

I also think there’s a lot of emotion that comes with stopping, which I hadn’t really expected.

There’s regret when I look back on certain situations. There’s embarrassment about how I behaved sometimes. There’s sadness about memories I’ve lost. And there’s also the realization that I can’t go back and change any of it.

I can only do things differently now.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life feeling ashamed of the past, but I don’t want to pretend it didn’t happen either.

It’s part of why I’m here.

People sometimes ask me if I’ve stopped drinking forever.

And my answer is usually that I don’t know. I’m just not drinking for now.

I don’t feel comfortable making a big declaration about forever. Maybe part of that is because I don’t want the pressure of having to explain myself to everyone. And maybe part of it is because I know how complicated my relationship with alcohol has been.

I’ve said before that my relationship with alcohol was so complicated that I had to break it off.

And that’s probably the best way I can describe it.

It gave me a lot of fun times over the years, or at least what I thought were fun times. But eventually it was taking more from me than it was giving me.

I think about people who are struggling with drinking, and I know how difficult it can be to even imagine life without it, particularly when it’s tied to your friendships, your culture, your social life, and your sense of who you are.

I also know that just because someone hasn’t stopped doesn’t mean they don’t want to, or that they haven’t tried. Everyone’s relationship with alcohol is different, and not everyone gets to the same place in the same way.

For me, I had reached a point where the pain had become too much.

And I think I had to recognize that for myself.

Others might have seen it long before I did. They might have worried about me or thought I was drinking too much. But until I reached that point myself, I don’t think I was really ready to change.

That’s just my experience. I know it’s not everyone’s.

Ten months later, I still think about drinking. I still miss certain parts of it. I still have moments when I wonder what it would be like to just have a drink and not have to think about any of this.

But then I remember why I stopped.

And I remember those mornings.

And I know I don’t want to go back to feeling that way.

I’m not suddenly a different person with everything figured out. I still have my struggles, my insecurities, and things about myself that I want to work on.

Stopping drinking hasn’t magically solved everything. In some ways, it’s made me look at things I probably avoided for years.

But I do feel more present. I feel more in control of my decisions. I know what happened the night before. I can wake up without that terrible anxiety hanging over me.

And those things matter to me.

I want to keep going, mainly for myself, but also for my kids. I want them to have a mum they can depend on and be proud of.

And I want to see what my life looks like without alcohol being such a big part of it.

I don’t know exactly what that looks like yet.

I’m still figuring out my friendships, my routines, what I enjoy, and even parts of who I am.

Some days that feels good, and other days it feels a little lonely.

But I think that’s okay.

I don’t want to turn these ten months into some big inspirational story, because that’s not really how it feels to me. It’s been difficult, uncomfortable at times, and also very revealing.

I know there are people quietly struggling with alcohol every day, people trying to stop, people who have stopped and started again, and people who are simply not ready or don’t know how to begin.

I understand more of that struggle now, and I certainly don’t judge anyone for where they are.

I can only speak for myself.

For me, the joy of drinking became overshadowed by the pain of drinking.

And eventually, I just didn’t want to live with that pain anymore.

So I stopped.

And ten months later, I’m still not drinking.

I’m proud of that, but I’m also very aware that I’m still figuring things out.

Maybe the biggest thing I’m learning is that I don’t need to know exactly who I am or what comes next.

For now, I’m just trying to live my life a little differently, be a better mother, be more honest with myself, and find out what makes me happy without a drink in my hand.

And for the first time in a very long time, I’m giving myself the chance to do that.

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“Vulnerability minus boundaries is not vulnerability.” ~Brené Brown

It’s ten at night, and I’m sprawled on the couch at the end of a long day, messaging an old friend from grad school. My wife is already in the slow process of heading to bed, the kids are asleep, and the house is quiet enough for a conversation to feel easy.

This isn’t something that happens often, but it isn’t unusual either.

The beginning is fun, like it always is. What’s going on with my family, how work is treating me, how life is in general. Then the same from her side.

I’ve always liked her. If we lived closer, we’d probably be much better friends, but distance does what distance does.

Then we run out of routine updates and arrive at the familiar fork in the road. You can share something personal, or you can close with a standard goodnight.

So do I tell her about my health and about the last year? Something chronic. Not exactly the glamorous kind.

I run into this decision a lot. On one hand, I’m embarrassed by it. On the other hand, I know there’s nothing to be embarrassed about, since none of it is my fault.

And we’re both psychologists, for heaven’s sake. If we can’t trust ourselves with this, then what are we doing here?

And then they show up. My wonderful defense mechanisms, rising to protect my delicate soul, each of them arriving with an excellent reason.

The first one: it’s late, and who has the energy for something this heavy right now?

The second one: she just told me she’s tired, so what am I going to do, dump something else on her?

The third one: and it’s not like she tells me about every illness she’s dealing with, right?

And I’m sitting there listening to myself. How considerate I am. Really looking out for her.

How generous of me not to burden an exhausted woman at a late hour.

Classic avoidance, dressed up as consideration. Yes, I know. I even know the clinical term for it.

And that’s the part that’s hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t been there. That I can see it happening in real time, and that seeing it doesn’t help at all.

Knowing stops nothing. It only makes the whole thing more embarrassing.

Look at that third excuse, by the way. It’s the only one that gives itself away. The first two at least pretend to be about her.

The third one isn’t consideration anymore; it’s accounting. She doesn’t give, so why should I.

But then something else comes up, and that one isn’t an excuse.

Because my close friends know. I don’t hide this. I’m not someone who avoids telling the people who are close to me.

What I don’t want is for it to turn into a conversation about me in a room I’m not in. Someone tells someone, in words that aren’t mine, and I’m not there to shape how it sounds.

And then they’ll feel sorry for me.

In the middle of that thought, a question surfaces. A question I once asked someone else, years ago. Something along the lines of: and how does it feel to imagine people talking about you, maybe pitying you?

I sit there with my own question turned on me, and I don’t answer it.

Because there is a difference between people who are close and people who are far, and the difference isn’t only distance.

With someone close, this piece of information joins a hundred other things they already know about me. It sits in proportion.

With someone far away, someone who sees me once in a long while, it might become the most prominent thing they know. My label from that day forward.

And there’s logic in that. I have a right to privacy. I’m not supposed to walk around with a sign announcing my medical status.

Avoiding the loss of control over my own story isn’t cowardice. It’s a consideration.

And yes, I care what people think of me. What can I say.

So that’s what’s on the table. Three bad excuses, and one thing that’s genuinely a consideration. And the difference between them matters.

Except I don’t get to decide.

Because right as my head starts to hurt from all the back and forth, my daughter wakes up from a bad dream.

A lifeline. Thank God, the deliberation is over. I’m going to take care of my daughter. Lucky me.

So I walk to her room, still half inside my own head.

But she’s a kid who enjoys talking whenever she wakes up, so it doesn’t take long for me to let the whole thing go. We talk about her bad dream. We talk about monsters.

Subjects that suit me much better right now.

The next morning came. Coffee, school run, inbox. Routine carried me forward.

A small thought stayed behind about the whole thing, but by then it already felt artificial to go back to it.

To write to her now, a day later, just to close something that was only ever open on my end.

And here I have to be honest with myself.

The deliberation wasn’t resolved. It was interrupted. A five-year-old woke up from a nightmare and put an end to it, and I called that postponing it until I’m ready.

As though it had been a decision.

I don’t think every avoidance needs to be solved. There are things you don’t tell, and there are people you don’t tell them to, and that’s completely fine.

The right not to share is a real right.

But there’s a difference between choosing to avoid and drifting into avoidance. And that night I didn’t choose.

I just ran out of time before I had to decide, and the excuses did their job until the lifeline arrived.

I still haven’t told her. Maybe I never will, and maybe that will turn out to be a perfectly reasonable decision. The only difference is that this time I know I didn’t choose.

I’ve thought about those three excuses since.

Two of them were about the hour. It was late, she was tired. Both of those expired by morning, and I still didn’t write to her, so clearly that wasn’t what stopped me.

The third one was keeping score, and I’m not proud of it.

The one that wasn’t an excuse is still here days later. I don’t want to become a story told in a room I’m not in. That one I think I get to keep.

That’s the difference I’d watch for. Not whether you end up telling someone, but what’s motivating you not to.

What I want isn’t to finally tell her. It’s to reach that fork and actually decide something, instead of letting whatever’s lying around at ten at night decide for me.

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For most of my life, I had a second full-time job. Nobody hired me for it. Nobody paid me. But it ate more hours than anything else I did. The job was pretending to be normal.

I am autistic. Growing up, I didn’t always have that word for it, but I knew one thing for sure: I was different, and different was not safe.

Kids let me know early. I got teased and picked on, and more than once someone looked at me like I was a science experiment and asked if I was from another planet.

So I did what a lot of kids do. I decided the problem was me, and I got to work fixing it.

I studied other people the way you’d study for an exam. I watched how they stood in groups, when they laughed, how long they held eye contact before looking away.

I memorized jokes.

I practiced facial expressions in the mirror.

I learned the rules of conversation like they were traffic laws: ask questions, don’t interrupt, don’t talk too long about the thing you actually care about.

I got good at it. That’s the exhausting part—I got good at it.

For years I could walk into a room and perform “normal” so convincingly that most people never suspected a thing. I made the small talk. I laughed at the right moments. I nodded along. And then I went home and collapsed, completely spent, like I’d run a marathon I never signed up for.

That’s what masking is, though I didn’t call it that at the time. It’s performing a version of yourself that’s acceptable to everyone else, at the cost of the person underneath.

Every social interaction became a performance. Every conversation, a tightrope walk. And I never got to put the costume down, because what if someone saw the real me and decided I wasn’t worth knowing?

The burnout crept up slowly. It started as tiredness—bone-deep tiredness after ordinary days. Then it became something heavier. I started dreading things I used to enjoy. Phone calls sat unanswered.

Invitations piled up. I’d cancel plans not because I didn’t want to see people, but because the thought of performing for another three hours made me want to cry.

I told myself I was lazy. I told myself everyone felt this way, and I just needed to try harder. That last part is funny, because trying harder was the whole problem. I had been trying harder than anyone around me for years, and it was breaking me.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about pretending to be someone else: it works just well enough to keep you trapped. I was functional. I held it together in public. So nobody saw a crisis. They saw a quiet guy who was maybe a little tired. And because I looked fine, I believed I should be fine, and I kept pushing the real feelings down and the performance up.

The turning point didn’t arrive as some dramatic revelation. There was no lightning bolt. It was more like a slow leak—the realization that I could keep this up for the rest of my life and be miserable, or I could stop and find out what was on the other side.

Stopping looked small at first. I stopped forcing eye contact that felt like staring into the sun. I stopped laughing at jokes I didn’t find funny. I let myself stim—rocking a little, fidgeting with my hands—the stuff my body had always wanted to do, but I’d always been too ashamed to let it.

I stopped apologizing for needing quiet. For years, I’d treated my need to recharge alone like a character flaw, something to confess. “Sorry, I’m just tired.” “Sorry, I need to head out early.” I dropped the sorry. I just needed quiet. That’s allowed.

And something strange happened. The world didn’t end.

Nobody staged an intervention because I stopped making small talk about the weather. A few friendships shifted—the ones built entirely on my performance couldn’t survive without it, and honestly, good riddance. But the real ones got better. It turns out people can feel it when you’re performing, and it’s actually harder to connect with someone wearing a mask than someone being awkwardly, genuinely themselves.

The biggest change was internal. For the first time, I wasn’t spending every waking hour monitoring myself.

Imagine carrying a heavy backpack everywhere for twenty years and finally setting it down. That’s what dropping the mask felt like. My shoulders came down. My jaw unclenched. I had energy left at the end of the day—energy I couldspend on things I actually enjoyed instead of recovering from things I endured.

I started noticing what I actually liked, not what I thought I was supposed to like.

I stopped forcing myself into loud, crowded situations to prove I could handle them and started choosing the quiet coffee shop, the walk alone, the evening with one good friend instead of the party with thirty acquaintances.

My life got smaller in some ways and infinitely richer in others.

Accepting that I’m autistic didn’t fix everything. I still have hard days. Sensory overload is real—a bad fluorescent light or a chaotic room can still wreck me. But now when it happens, I don’t add a layer of shame on top of it. I don’t think, “What’s wrong with me?” I think, “This environment isn’t built for my brain, and that’s information, not a verdict.”

That shift—from “I’m broken” to “I’m different and that’s fine”—changed everything. Not because the world changed. It didn’t. But because I stopped asking the world for permission to be myself.

Here’s what I want you to know, if you’re reading this and you’re exhausted from your own version of the performance: the mask feels like protection, but it’s actually a cage. It keeps you safe from rejection, sure. But it also keeps you from rest, from genuine connection, from the relief of just being a person instead of a project.

You don’t have to drop it all at once. I didn’t. Start small. Let one unguarded thing be true in one safe place. Notice how it feels. Notice that the people worth keeping don’t flinch.

I spent years trying to be normal, and all it got me was tired. The day I stopped, I didn’t become someone new. I became someone I’d been all along, underneath the performance—and he turned out to be worth knowing. Normal was never the goal. It was the obstacle. And I don’t miss it at all.

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I know myself pretty well by now.

I’ve had seven decades to work on the case, and I’m not exactly known for leaving a question alone.

I know what matters to me. What gives me energy. What drains it. What I want more of. And what I have absolutely no intention of putting up with again.

At seventy, I’ve accumulated a fair amount of information.

Preferences. Patterns. Opinions. A fairly detailed operating manual.

After more than two decades as an executive coach, I’m also pretty good at helping other people figure these things out.

I could probably create a beautifully organized PowerPoint presentation about the next chapter of my life.

I’d know exactly how to format it.

I just wouldn’t know what to put on the slides. Which may be part of the problem.

We spend years trying to know ourselves better. Our patterns. Our triggers. Our strengths. Our blind spots. The stories we tell ourselves.

All useful.

But I’m beginning to wonder if self-awareness can eventually turn into something else.

Self-definition.

“I notice this about myself” becomes “This is who I am.”

And once we decide who we are, we can get pretty good at proving ourselves right.

I’ve said for years that I’m not a joiner. It rolls off my tongue.

I love being with people. Well, many of them. But clubs? Committees? Organized groups? Not really my thing.

Case closed.

Except recently I found myself scrolling through Meetup groups near where I live.

Books. Walking. Museums. Films. Travel. Food. Conversation. Practically every interest imaginable.

Who knew?

Apparently, millions of people.

I found several that sounded genuinely appealing. Then I closed the computer.

Signing up was easy. Actually showing up required a separate negotiation with myself.

Suddenly there were emails I should answer. Things around the house that needed attention. And, of course, another episode of Lioness.

Somewhere in the middle of this, I heard myself say it again.

I’m just not a joiner.

This time I caught it. Is that true? Or was it once true?

Those aren’t necessarily the same thing.

Walking into a room where I know no one has never come naturally to me. It’s easier when I have a role. A reason to be there. Someone waiting for me.

A Meetup is different.

You walk in because you chose to. No assignment. No built-in place. No guarantee you’ll click with anyone.

For someone who says she wants more connection, I can be surprisingly resistant to the awkward few minutes that often come before it.

Maybe “I’m not a joiner” isn’t entirely about groups. Maybe part of it is not yet knowing where I’ll belong. And belonging rarely happens before you show up.

That got my attention.

Because we all collect descriptions of ourselves.

I’m shy.

I’m not creative.

I could never travel alone.

I don’t like parties.

Some are absolutely true.

There’s real freedom in knowing yourself well enough to stop auditioning for experiences you already know you don’t enjoy.

At this point, I have no need to discover one more time that yelling over loud music is not my preferred form of human connection.

We’ve earned some clarity.

But what else may have gotten filed under self-knowledge without really deserving a permanent spot there?

Maybe someone decided in third grade that they weren’t artistic because their drawing of a horse looked like a kitchen appliance.

Sixty years later, they still won’t pick up a paintbrush.

I have another one.

I don’t give dinner parties. Except I like having people in my home. I love conversation. I’ve hosted plenty of gatherings.

What I don’t love is cooking. Somewhere along the way, apparently, I turned that into a personality trait.

Who wants to spend three hours preparing a wonderful meal I could eat in three minutes in front of a Phillies game?

And last I checked, food can be purchased.

So maybe I don’t dislike dinner parties. Maybe I dislike making dinner.

This is not a major psychological breakthrough. But I’m increasingly fond of the small ones.

Then there are the stories we tell ourselves that are a lot more flattering.

Open-minded.

Easygoing.

A great listener.

Think of the person who considers himself a wonderful listener while his spouse has been trying to finish the same sentence since Tuesday.

Most of us carry around an internal portrait of ourselves. Some of it is pretty accurate. Some may have had a little help from the AirBrush app.

That’s the other side of knowing ourselves.

It’s one thing to question a belief that limits us. It’s another to question one we rather like.

Maybe I’m not quite as open-minded as I think. Maybe I’m not such a great listener. Maybe “I’m just being direct” sounds very different to the person on the receiving end.

Those are less fun. Probably more useful.

Lately, I’ve been listening for certain phrases when they come out of my mouth.

I always.

I never.

I’m just not someone who…

I don’t automatically argue with them. I just make them show their work. When did I decide that? Is it still true? And maybe the question with the most bite:

What do I get to avoid if I keep believing it? Feeling awkward? Looking foolish? Finding out I’m not particularly good at something? Walking into a room where nobody knows my name?

Sometimes the story is protecting something. And sometimes it’s just old. That’s what interests me.

Not reinvention. I’m a little tired of that word.

We talk as though we periodically toss out one version of ourselves and unveil a shiny new one. That hasn’t been my experience.

I’m still the girl who rode her bike everywhere. The young woman who became a television journalist. The woman who walked away from that career and built another one.

They’re all still here. They just don’t all get a vote on every decision.

Maybe our earlier selves leave behind more than memories. They leave rules.

I’m not a joiner.

I don’t give dinner parties.

I would never do that.

That’s just not me.

Maybe.

Or maybe the rule has been sitting there so long nobody thought to ask whether it still applies.

The unexamined life may be a problem.

I’m beginning to think the overexplained life has hazards too.

You can get so good at telling yourself who you are that you stop noticing when life starts giving you different information.

I know myself pretty well. I hope I always will.

I’m just less interested these days in turning that knowledge into a permanent job description.

I’ve spent seven decades becoming the woman I am. It would be a shame to assume I’ve met all of her.

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“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.” ~Mary Oliver 

I’ve spent much of my life living in fear of countless imagined tragedies—especially the untimely death of those I love.

Growing up, within the span of a few years, three children I was very close to lost one of their parents. The emotional devastation that followed taught me that people can disappear in an instant, shattering a world that had once felt happy and safe. My newfound awareness of the fragility of life led to panic attacks about my own parents dying.

These childhood experiences intensified my terror of death and further cemented the challenging emotional legacy I inherited from my parents: an activated nervous system perpetually primed for disaster.

My mother and father were both Holocaust survivors who’d been orphaned during the war. They’d each lost almost their entire family and every single material possession. The emotional atmosphere in our home was thick with unspoken grief and fear.

To me, death always felt apocalyptic—not a natural part of life. It’s no wonder that I spent decades struggling with intense anxiety about the innumerable catastrophes that could befall me and my family.

But in recent years—thanks to much healing work and a steadfast commitment to practices that calm my nervous system—I’ve been slowly learning to live with more ease.

Then tragedy struck one of my closest family friends. Seth Pollack—wise and wonderful, joyous and generous—was hit by a car during his morning bike ride. He died instantly.

Seth’s wife is my treasured friend, and our lives are closely interwoven. Suddenly, she and her daughters were thrust into a new life of tremendous loss and grief.

Devastated and in shocked disbelief, all my age-old terrors came roaring back. Once again, life felt unbearably painful, menacing, and fragile.

Now, almost a year has passed. While the anguish of losing Seth has not receded, his death, the beautiful way he lived, and the brave and honest way his family has been coping with his absence have all been teaching me important lessons about how I want to live.

Accepting the Truth of Impermanence

My friend’s death proved that although my anxiety about tragic loss has been intensified by trauma, my fears are not irrational. There is no way to guarantee that the people we cherish will be here tomorrow—or that we will be.

The truth is that the terms of being a human on this earth are non-negotiable, and worry is not protective. Constantly fighting against a reality that none of us can change is completely futile.

While knowing that nothing lasts forever can be frightening, it can also awaken us to the preciousness of the life we have right now.

Suddenly, I understood with startling clarity that I have two distinct choices about how to live the rest of my life: remain imprisoned by terror of inevitable loss or let the certainty of impermanence deepen my appreciation of the present moment—not scare me away from it.

Cultivating Presence Instead of Fear

When someone we deeply love and admire dies, they become extraordinarily present in our thoughts, bringing the qualities we most appreciated about them into sharper focus. Their light can even seem to shine brighter and serve as a guide, illuminating the path we want to follow.

No matter how heartbreaking Seth’s sudden death was, everyone who knew him felt that he’d lived a magnificently full and meaningful life—embracing this world’s wonders and pleasures while enriching and uplifting the lives of so many others.

Seth lived with faith, not fear. He would never want his legacy to be that those who loved him became more frightened of living.

His example makes me wonder how I will feel when I look back on my own life. Will I have allowed my worries to steal so much of my peace and joy, or will I have figured out a way to live with more serenity and faith?

Since I’ve never been able to reason myself out of anxiety, I decided to try a new experiment. I asked the frightened parts of myself if they would be willing to put their anxiety aside for just a few hours and try to embody the qualities I found so inspiring in my friend and still feel so strongly despite his physical absence.

I wasn’t demanding permanent change from parts of myself that had spent a lifetime being vigilant. I was simply asking: Could we try presence instead of fear for one afternoon?

For the next few hours, whenever fear arose, I acknowledged it and reassured myself that I could attend to it later—just not right now. Rather than trying to suppress or push fear away, I returned to the present moment, tuning in to the feelings of relaxation and trust I was trying to cultivate.

That afternoon turned out to be one of the most pleasurable I can remember, even though I simply went about my usual routine. Nothing outwardly changed; what changed was my experience of it.

I felt lighter, more relaxed, and more open to pleasure and connection. I could hold my husband’s gaze longer, sing with gusto while walking my dogs, and initiate lengthier hugs.

The Cost of Living in Fear

My experiment helped me understand that fear doesn’t just make me suffer—it closes me off and diminishes how fully I engage with life. Fear narrows my perspective and breeds wariness and suspicion. It directs me toward everything that might go wrong and away from what is actually happening in the present moment.

That one afternoon not only illuminated what fear has been costing me, it also allowed me to taste what’s possible when it no longer co-opts my attention and drains so much of my energy.

While fear insists that I need certainty before I can feel safe, trust lets me participate wholeheartedly in a life that has never offered certainty to anyone.

I’ve been returning to this experiment regularly, and the more often I do it, the easier and more natural it gets. I’m slowly learning that I don’t have to follow fear every time it appears. Life is far more magical and enjoyable without it.

Choosing What to Carry Forward

I have a powerful legacy of fear to contend with, but tuning into my friend’s enduring light and joyous buoyancy is giving me a taste of a much happier way to live. This practice is showing me that deeply ingrained patterns from the past do not need to define me. I have the agency to shape my own future.

Being so close to the type of tragedy that has always terrified me confirmed that we can lose someone we love without warning, and the pain will be devastating. But it also proved that endlessly anticipating that pain will not protect or prepare me, which has weakened some of fear’s hold.

I’m beginning to understand that mortality can teach the opposite lesson from the one fear has taught me for so long. Fear says, “Because I could lose this, I need to constantly brace myself.” But another voice is becoming stronger: “Because I could lose this, I want to fully appreciate it while I can.”

The inevitability of loss does not need to be an argument for living fearfully. It can be a powerful reason to love more deeply and to savor life more unreservedly.

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“Children are not things to be molded, but people to be unfolded.” ~Jess Lair

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“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” ~Albert Camus

A little over a year ago, I went to a bookstore on a cold night to meet a friend at the café. It’s taken me this long to finally write about it.

We had one of those conversations you need when you’re trying to make sense of things during the busy rush of life. The kind of conversation that makes you feel like you’re in the right place at the right time and you’re making progress.

I left the bookstore feeling like I was a little bit closer to being on the right track in life, got into my car, and started driving home. I was thinking about the conversation, feeling grateful.

Then I stopped at a traffic light on one of the major roads. I looked into my rear-view mirror and saw a car coming toward me at full speed. In an instant, I realized the driver wasn’t slowing down.

There wasn’t time to think. I braced myself for the impact.

I watched him try to swerve, but he couldn’t avoid me. He struck the left taillight of my car with such force that I don’t remember what happened in the few seconds afterward.

The next thing I can recall is being on the side of the intersection, apparently having rolled several hundred feet from where I’d been waiting at the light. I was disoriented and trying to figure out where I was.

The police arrived and asked some basic questions about what had happened. When I tried to answer, all I could do was stutter.

I couldn’t get the words out. I kept repeating myself. A paramedic told me I was in shock.

Being in shock is a strange experience. Your mind is working to comprehend the situation while your body is still freaking out.

I called my wife, and she came to get me. We found out that the person who hit me had fled the scene and had struck several other cars as he escaped.

Several of us were standing in the median with flashing police lights surrounding us. We all started talking, and I learned that one of the women was celebrating her birthday.

I remember looking across the street and seeing a bakery. I thought about going over and getting her a cake. That would’ve been perfect.

We were standing in the middle of a major intersection after a violent collision, surrounded by damaged cars and flashing lights, and still could’ve had cake!

I wanted to celebrate the fact that she was still here. That we all had survived this experience and could still make something good from it.

I’d love to say we had a wonderful time on the side of the road eating cake together, but it never happened. We walked to the bakery, and it was closed.

Standing there on the grass between traffic lanes, looking at that closed shop, something shifted in me. The strange tenderness of wanting to buy a stranger a cake in the middle of a crash site felt just as real as the collision itself.

I like to imagine that life is more predictable than it is. We make plans, build careers, raise children, fall in love, save money, make appointments, go to bookstores, sit at traffic lights, and assume the next moment will resemble the one we’re currently experiencing.

Most of the time, it does.

But sometimes a car comes barreling through a red light. Sometimes a phone rings with news we never expected. Sometimes someone we love gets sick.

Relationships change. Jobs that once felt secure become uncertain. The future we imagined disappears and leaves us standing in a place we never intended to be.

The difficulty I’ve found is that we can’t shield ourselves completely from any of it. That realization can make us afraid. It can also make us awake.

I’m starting to understand that maybe the question isn’t how we can make life safe enough that nothing terrible will ever happen. Maybe it’s more like focusing on the kind of person we want to be while we are here—the choices we make, the way we love, and the way we respond when life doesn’t go the way we had hoped.

I’ve spent decades searching for answers because I want to understand how a human being can live with uncertainty without becoming consumed by it.

I’ve learned that I can’t control everything that happens to me. But I can become more present to what is happening.

I can notice my fear without becoming identified with it. I can embrace my longing for approval without allowing it to determine my actions. I can face the places where I feel empty inside and become curious about them instead of trying to fill them right away.

Right now, I’m writing this essay at a park with my bare feet on the grass. The breeze is cool on my skin, and I hear children laughing on the playground.

I’m breathing. I’m here. I’m alive.

Somewhere, someone is sitting at a red light without giving a second thought to what might happen next.

Being awake means knowing that this moment is not guaranteed and choosing to enter it anyway. It means doing the work that feels like ours to do and loving people even though we can’t keep them forever.

I’m also discovering how important it is, for me at least, to tell the story.

When I share my life’s stories, I don’t know exactly who will read it.

You might be struggling with your own uncertainty. You might be someone who has experienced something much more frightening. You might be sitting at a crossroads in your own life, wondering who you really are and whether there is still time to become that person.

Maybe you’re carrying something nobody else can see; I don’t know. But, when I tell you my story, something beautiful happens. For a moment, I’m not alone in my experience, and I hope that as you read, you’re not alone in yours.

We can’t prevent every collision or know what’s coming through the next intersection. And there’s no guarantee that the bakery will be open when we need a birthday cake.

But we can stand together in the median for a while. We can look at one another and say, “We’re still here.”

That’s enough to make us stop, breathe, and realize what an extraordinary thing it is to be alive.

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“Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.” ~ Bessel van der Kolk

For years, I thought my anxiety was a character flaw. I thought I could think my way through it. Reason with myself long enough, and I’d finally get to the other side of it. I never did.

Every time I thought I had made peace with it, something small would happen, and I’d be right back in that place. Heart racing. Hands shaking. Anticipating a fallout in something that hadn’t even happened yet.

In my previous marriage, I learned to read a room before I even understood I was reading it. I could tell from the sound of a door closing how the night was going to play out. I walked on eggshells for years.

My body knew things my mind hadn’t caught up to yet. I’d feel my chest tighten and my stomach drop, and I’d start smoothing things over before I even knew what I was smoothing over. I called it being “sensitive” or “too much.” I never once called it what it actually was.

When I finally left that marriage, I thought the anxiety would leave with it. It didn’t. Years later, in situations that weren’t dangerous at all, I’d still feel that same tightness in my chest. A raised voice in another room. A delayed text back. Someone going quiet during an argument. My body would react like I was in danger even when I wasn’t.

My mind would spend hours afterward trying to talk myself down from something it hadn’t fully understood in the first place.

I didn’t understand what was actually happening until I started training as a health counselor and studying attachment theory.

My anxiety was a nervous system that had learned a long time ago that danger could show up without warning. It built a whole set of reactions to keep me safe. Reactions that fired on their own long before my conscious thoughts ever got a vote.

That’s what anxious attachment looks like from the inside. A nervous system that learned early that connection could disappear without warning, so it stays braced for loss even when nothing’s actually wrong.

This is what nervous system dysregulation looks like day to day. A body that learned, at some point, to treat ordinary stress like a real threat. It keeps sounding the alarm until something teaches it otherwise.

This is the part that took me the longest to understand. No amount of reasoning with myself touched it. That reaction lived somewhere older and faster than the reasoning part of my brain.

A part of me that had learned its lessons through repetition, emotion, and the body itself, long before I had words for any of it.

A nervous system responds to repetition, emotion, and physiology. That’s how change actually happens and new neuropathways get formed—by working a new pattern into the body the same way the old one got there.

The shift that changed everything for me started very small. I started paying attention to the reaction while it was happening.

Even now, in a relationship where I’m safe and loved, I sometimes catch it. My partner goes quiet for a few minutes, and my chest tightens before I can stop it. The old questions surface: Is he mad? Did I do something? My body braces for impact that isn’t coming.

But now I notice it. Right as my chest tightens, right as my shoulders creep up toward my ears, I put my hand on my chest and breathe deeply until it softens. I name what my body is actually doing. My chest is tight. My shoulders are up around my ears. I’m holding my breath. That’s all.

Just naming it, staying with it, letting it move through me. I remind myself that silence doesn’t mean what it used to mean. I stay in the present moment instead of disappearing into old stories.

Over time—and it did take time—that pause grew. The gap between the trigger and my reaction went from nothing to a second. Then a few seconds. Then long enough that I could choose what happened next.

I started responding to what was actually happening in front of me, paying attention to the present moment on its own terms. That gap is where my life changed. Slowly, in all the small ordinary moments where I used to disappear into old patterns without even noticing I’d left, it began to shift.

If you’ve spent years feeling like your anxiety is some kind of personal failing or something you should’ve fixed by now through sheer willpower or enough therapy or enough journaling, I want you to hear this. Your body is doing exactly what it learned to do to keep you safe, and it’s still doing that job today. Even in situations where you’re not in danger anymore.

Healing starts in the body, with noticing what’s happening there before your mind even catches up to explain it. Regulating your nervous system can start right where you are, with something as simple as noticing one sensation and staying with it a few seconds longer than usual.

Here’s what I’ve learned about working with a nervous system.

First, notice before you narrate.

The instant something happens in your body, your mind wants to jump in with a story about what it means. Before you get to the story, just notice the sensation itself. The tight chest. The shallow breath. The urge to apologize or explain or disappear. Notice it the way you’d notice weather moving across the sky, without deciding yet what it means about you.

Let’s say someone you love goes quiet. Before you ask what’s wrong or start replaying the last hour looking for what you did, pause. Put your hand somewhere grounding—your chest, your belly, your thigh. Notice what’s happening in your body right now. Name it without explaining it. Tight chest. Shallow breath. Urge to fix. That’s the first step.

Second, breathe through it before you decide what to do next.

Anxiety wants you to act immediately. Fix it. Explain it. Smooth it over. Most of the time, there’s no real emergency requiring that speed. A few slow breaths won’t cost you anything, and they give your body enough time to remember it’s not actually under attack.

In that same moment, with the quiet partner and the tightening chest, try this: Breathe in for four counts. Out for six. Let your exhale be longer than your inhale. Do it two or three times before you say or do anything. You’re not ignoring the situation. You’re giving your body a chance to come back online before you respond from a place that isn’t actually about what’s happening right now.

Third, expect this to take repetition.

The pattern took years to build, and it won’t undo itself the first time you try something new. Every time you pause before reacting, even for one extra second, you’re teaching your nervous system something it didn’t know before. That adds up slowly. Then one day you realize the gap that used to be a fraction of a second is now long enough to actually live in.

This shift is available to you no matter where you’re starting from. Even if therapy hasn’t touched it yet. Even if you’ve read every book and tried every technique and still find yourself reacting the same old way.

The body holds the pattern, and the body can learn a new one. It happens through paying attention, gently and consistently, until your nervous system finally believes what your mind’s known for a while now. That you’re safe and that you get to decide what happens next.

I still catch old patterns sometimes. A voice raised in another room can still make my chest tighten for half a second before I remember where I actually am. The difference now is I notice it. I breathe through it. I get to choose what happens next, and so do you.

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“I once heard someone say that a sign of enlightenment was the ability to say (and mean it) ‘Well, this isn’t what I want, but it’s what I got, so okay.’” ~Sylvia Boorstein

I once met a speed-cuber, one of those people who could solve a Rubik’s Cube in sixty seconds. Nice friendly young guy.

I hated him.

Not personally.

I hated him on the level of metaphor.

I hated him because I was jealous. Life always felt to me just like one big insoluble Rubik’s Cube. I could never get things under control on all sides at once. The harder I tried to make one side of my cube all one color, the more infuriatingly multicolored the other sides got.

It’s still like that. I still can’t get everything right at once. I can see clients or do chores around the house. I can spend time with my family or work on my book. I can go to dinner with friends or watch my weight. I can keep up with my professional reading or read mysteries to relax.

The one thing I can’t do is everything. I’m trading off all damn day long.

That seems to be how change works in the larger world too. The more we try to force life to meet our expectations, the more life pushes back.

It is a point made by cautionary tales as old as Midas and Scrooge and as modern as Jurassic Park.

And it is especially relevant to those of us who struggle with addiction to control.

I should explain that I consider myself a control addict.

I consider you one, too.

I don’t mean we’re all bossy or domineering. By control I mean our deep human desire to make reality cooperate—to make people, situations, and outcomes conform to our needs, wants, and expectations.

I’ve spent years thinking about how we do this, and why.

Along the way I’ve come to see three paradoxes hiding inside our attempts at control.

The first paradox is that the more control we need, the less in control we tend to feel. The second paradox is that the harder we try to control other people, the more we force them to control us back

But it’s the third paradox that made me hate the speed-cuber:

To get control in one place, you must give it up in another.

I am not alone in hating this idea.

I can think of many people whose determined attempt to get control over one area of their lives triggered a loss of control in another.

The drinker who used alcohol to manage his feelings, only to lose control of his need for alcohol.

The business executive who achieved success and status at work but became estranged from his wife and kids and extended family.

The mom who made her children the focus of her existence, then found herself so disconnected from her husband that they essentially stopped speaking.

The depressed man who spent years successfully hiding his feelings from everyone, then one morning found himself too exhausted to get out of bed.

And so on.

You’d think watching the third paradox in action over and over again would teach me to remember it.

You would be wrong.

I still want to write the book and spend time with my family. I want to earn money and take time to rest and play. I want bagels and pizza and the number on the bathroom scale to drop.

One thing has changed, though.

I’m getting better at not treating the scrambled side of the cube as meaning I’ve screwed up.

For most of my life, I took the scrambled side as evidence of failure. If the house was a mess, I should have cleaned it. If I wasn’t writing, I was wasting time. If I was writing, I was neglecting something else. If I ate the pizza, I shouldn’t have. If I skipped it, I was missing something I wanted.

There was always another side of the cube accusing me.

Now I see it as a reminder of something.

It reminds me that I’ve made a choice.

That inside every “yes” there’s a “no.” That a good writing day means chores don’t get done. That a good chore day means the book doesn’t get written.

Every choice costs me something.

Stated that plainly, the lesson seems Duh-obvious.

That it’s not obvious, for me or for most people, returns me to the idea of control.

Because there’s a part of each of us that simply wants what it wants. That wants and expects and demands and feels hurt and angry when that demand is not met. That doesn’t just want choices, but choices without cost. That wants to have the cake and to eat it at the same time.

Call this part stubborn, or childish, or addicted, as I do.

Whatever you call it, I’m guessing you carry some version of it too.

Don’t misunderstand me. I still envy that kid. I’d still love to know what it feels like to watch all six sides click perfectly into place.

But the addicted part of me is also coming­­­­—slowly —to accept that life isn’t a Rubik’s Cube.

Let me close with a story that shows what I mean.

During a routine physical my doc runs a cardiogram and finds a blip that suggests a TIA (transient ischemic attack). He tells me to drive to the ER. I feel fine, but I go.

At the hospital they put me on a gurney and park me in a hallway for four hours while they run tests. I have to cancel six client sessions, calm my worried wife over the phone, wonder what all this will cost, and then just lie there and wait.

At one time I would have reacted to all this with frustration, worry, or anger. Now I surprise myself by taking a one-hour nap. It’s a pretty good nap, too.

The surprise here was discovering that the addicted part of me has become willing to accept tradeoffs without protest.

To believe I’m not failing at life just because I can’t solve it.

And that the one thing I can’t do is everything.

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