On the version of yourself you outgrow without noticing, and the soft work of beginning again.
There is a kind of grief that doesn't announce itself. It moves in slow, like late afternoon light through a kitchen window, and one day you realize the woman you were has already left the room.
I used to be afraid of the unmaking. Of the moment when the life you built so carefully begins to feel like a costume that no longer fits. I called it falling apart. I think now it was something closer to falling open.
The quiet undoing is not a crisis. It is a permission slip, written in your own handwriting, that you have been afraid to sign.
If you are in it now — the soft middle, the not-yet, the in-between — I want you to know there is nothing wrong with you. You are not behind. You are simply becoming, again, and this time on purpose.
— Jessica
