I Gave Myself Away in Pieces

Somebody asked me last year what I like to do.

Not what I do. What I like to do. And I sat there with my mouth slightly open like she'd asked me to recite the periodic table.

I had an answer eventually. It was a bad answer. It was a thing I used to like in 1998.

Nobody takes it all at once

That's the thing about how this happens. There was never a day I decided to stop being a person with her own preferences. It went one piece at a time, and every single piece was a reasonable trade.

The Saturday mornings went first, to practices. The book club went when work got heavy — just for this season, I said. The friendship went quiet because we were both underwater and neither of us had the energy to reach. The thing I used to make with my hands got packed in a box during a move and the box never got unpacked.

Each one made sense on its own. Nobody talked me into anything. I handed them over myself, cheerfully, because that's what the season asked for.

And then the season ended and I looked around and there was nothing in my hands.

What we call self-care isn't it

I want to be careful here, because I'm not against a bath.

But what gets sold to us as self-care is mostly maintenance — the minimum required to get you back on the field. A face mask so you can keep going. A weekend away so you can come back and absorb more. It's refueling the machine, and it's fine, and it isn't what we're talking about.

Reclaiming is different. Reclaiming is going back for what you left.

It's the difference between resting so you can serve again, and asking what you would do with a Saturday if nobody needed anything from you. That second question is harder. That second question is the one that made me sit there with my mouth open.

It comes back slowly and badly

Here's what nobody says about picking things back up: you'll be terrible at them, and it will feel humiliating, and that feeling is the whole toll.

I went back to something I used to be good at and I was not good at it anymore. Twenty-two years of not doing a thing will do that. And there's a voice that says this is embarrassing at your age, who do you think you are — and that voice is the exact same voice that let you give it away in the first place.

Be bad at it. Be fifty-three and bad at something on purpose. There's no one grading this.

Small, specific, and yours

What's worked for the women I've watched do this isn't a big reinvention. It's small and specific and doesn't announce itself.

One of them started leaving the house alone on Sunday mornings. Just leaving. Coffee somewhere, no destination, back by eleven. Her family adjusted in about two weeks.

One of them took the box out of the garage.

One of them said no to hosting the holiday for the first time in nineteen years and reported that the earth did not, in fact, open up.

None of that is a bubble bath. All of it is a woman taking something back.

Start with the question

You don't have to know what you like yet. I didn't. Most women I talk to don't, and they're embarrassed about it, and they shouldn't be — it's what happens when you spend twenty years being excellent at somebody else's needs.

So start with the question instead of the answer. What did I used to reach for? What did I set down, and when, and for whom? What's in the box in the garage?

You gave yourself away in pieces. You get to gather yourself back the same way.

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