Part Two: September 1 through September 23
September started with me feeling like I had maybe, possibly, somewhat figured out this whole starting over thing. That was cute. I had new work, new people in my life, the tree company still very much requiring my attention, a teenager to raise, a house that needed approximately nine thousand things, and just enough confidence to think, “Okay, maybe I can actually do this.” Life apparently heard me and said, “Wonderful. Here are seventeen more tabs.”
Dating was still happening, although I use the word “dating” loosely because sometimes it was dates and sometimes it was me developing feelings through conversations with men who had jobs, hobbies, friends, dogs, games, complicated schedules, and a suspicious ability to disappear into their own lives while I was over here wondering whether the period at the end of a text had emotional significance. I was trying very hard to be normal about all of this. I feel like effort should count for something.
One connection in particular got under my skin in a way I had not expected. I genuinely liked him. Not just in the “well, you are extremely nice to look at” way, although I am not going to insult anyone by pretending that part did not exist. I liked his personality. I liked talking to him. I wanted to learn the things he liked, play games with him, hang out, and be around him without every interaction needing to become some official romantic event with reservations and a dress code.
The problem was trying to explain that without sounding like I had already mentally picked out curtains for our future home. I could like someone. I could be attracted to him. I could hope dating might eventually happen. And I could still understand that right now we were getting to know each other and spending time together as people. All of that made perfect sense inside my head. Then I had to put it into actual words and suddenly I was a nervous attorney presenting the case of Sami v. I Promise I Am Not Trying to Marry You Tuesday.
At the same time, another connection was showing me something completely different. I could adore talking to someone and still find myself becoming nervous about how I spoke around them. I noticed myself measuring words, preparing for a joke or a tone that might hit me wrong, and trying not to react too strongly when something hurt. That bothered me because I already knew what it felt like to monitor a room before deciding which version of myself was safest to bring into it. I did not want to recreate that feeling in relationships that were supposed to be making my life lighter.
Then September 11 arrived, the date that would have been my wedding anniversary. That was an odd day emotionally because I did not want the marriage back. I did not want to rewind anything. But grief apparently does not care whether you would actually return to the thing you are grieving. Sometimes you are grieving the years. Sometimes you are grieving the plans. Sometimes you are grieving the version of yourself who believed the story was going to end differently.
And naturally, my brain decided this would be an excellent time to open the filing cabinet marked Every Horrible Thing You Have Ever Thought About Yourself. Unwanted. Unloved. Not good enough. Not worth choosing. All those lovely little thoughts nobody invited to dinner, yet somehow they arrived early and brought luggage. Dating while feeling like that is especially entertaining because somebody can take a few hours to respond and suddenly your brain is trying to connect a man you barely know to sixteen years of emotional history. Very rational. Excellent detective work.
The difference was that I was starting to catch myself doing it. Not every time. We are not performing miracles here. But sometimes I could actually stop and think, “Okay, the feeling is real. The story I am building around it may be complete nonsense.” Sometimes I talked it through. Sometimes I wrote. Sometimes I cried. Sometimes I played games until my brain got distracted. Sometimes I cleaned something that had done absolutely nothing wrong to deserve that level of intensity.
While my personal life was auditioning for a strange little dramedy, work decided September needed another subplot. Around the middle of the month, I stepped into another opportunity involving a real estate portfolio with five properties. Tenants, repairs, renovations, vendors, attorneys, bookkeeping, organization, and several different people who all needed to know what was happening. Basically, someone looked at me managing chaos and said, “You know what she needs? Buildings.”
The weird thing was that it fit. I liked being the person who could look at a giant pile of moving parts and start sorting them into something that made sense. I liked coordinating people. I liked tracking problems. I liked figuring out what needed to happen next and who needed to make it happen. Somewhere between tree customers, project management, creative work, client communication, and now property operations, I began to realize I may have accidentally built an entire career around being professionally good at saying, “Okay, everybody stop. What are we actually doing?”
September 17 was another reminder that my work life had become very different very quickly. Programs were launching. Emails needed to go out. Social content needed to exist. Graphics had to be finished. Announcements had to be made. Systems had to work. People needed answers. Meanwhile, the tree company was still operating because apparently I had accidentally selected the career setting labeled Multiple Simultaneous Plotlines.
Oddly, I liked a lot of it. I liked being useful. I liked creating things. I liked taking something that looked confusing and making it make sense. I liked knowing people trusted me to figure things out. For years, I had thought of my work mostly in terms of the tree company because that was the world I knew. Now I was starting to see that the thing I was actually good at was much bigger than trees. I knew how to run things. Apparently I had been doing project management long before anybody handed me the title.
My body, meanwhile, had decided it also wanted representation in September. There were stomach issues, weird reactions to food, moments where my heart rate seemed determined to participate in activities without asking me first, and enough digestive drama to make me start paying much closer attention to what I was eating. I started realizing certain foods and I might need to redefine our relationship. Apparently even my stomach was setting boundaries before I fully learned how.
The house was another project sitting in the background quietly judging me. By September 19, I had decided enough was enough and started working through a full reset. Living room. Dining room. Kitchen. Counters. Floors. Guinea pig cage. All the places that somehow become disaster zones while you are busy doing literally everything else. Nothing makes you question your life choices quite like cleaning one room, walking into another, and realizing the first room somehow already has stuff in it again.
There was something strangely satisfying about getting the house back under control, though. I was not painting yet. I was not doing some glamorous makeover reveal. I was just trying to get my environment to stop looking like my brain felt. One thing at a time. One room at a time. One pile of “I will deal with this later” at a time. Apparently later had arrived and she was irritated.
By the twenty first, I was having one of those days where I needed to remind myself that I was actually doing better than it sometimes felt. That has been one of the stranger parts of all this. Growth does not always feel like growth while you are in it. Sometimes it feels like being tired, annoyed, emotional, overthinking a text, answering thirty seven work messages, and then suddenly realizing you handled something differently than you would have two months ago. Very rude of personal development not to come with confetti.
Dating was shifting too. I was starting to understand that I could genuinely like somebody without making myself responsible for keeping the connection alive. I could reach out. I could show interest. I could tell someone I liked them. I could be affectionate and open because those things are part of who I am. But I did not want to keep being the one reviving every conversation like I was performing CPR on a text thread.
I was also getting clearer about who I actually am when I am not twisting myself into whatever shape might make somebody else comfortable. I am affectionate. I am loud sometimes. I am sarcastic. I am emotional. I ask questions. I care deeply. I can be anxious. I can be awkward as hell. I can go from a serious conversation to an inappropriate joke with almost no transition time. None of that needed to be erased. It just needed to be understood, managed when necessary, and given to people who actually appreciated it.
By September 23, I was still anxious, still awkward, still learning, and still fully capable of turning a slightly different texting pattern into an internal congressional hearing. But I was catching myself sooner. I was starting to understand that somebody being quiet did not automatically mean I had done something wrong. I was figuring out that liking someone and losing myself in someone were two completely different things. I was learning that work could change without me falling apart, that my career could expand in directions I had never planned, and that a messy house did not mean I had failed at adulthood. It mostly meant I had been busy living in it.
I still had no polished five-year plan. I had several jobs, several emotional plotlines, an active tree company, a teenager, a house in various stages of “we are getting there,” a dating life that occasionally required protective equipment, and a brain that continued to believe every unanswered question deserved immediate investigation. But I was moving. I was figuring things out. I was laughing at myself more. And for the first time in a long time, the chaos did not feel like proof that my life was falling apart.
It just felt like my life.
A weird one.
But mine.
To be continued: September 24 and beyond.
My life. My voice. Whatever comes next.
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