Hi friend,
Two weeks ago we dropped our youngest off at sleepaway camp.
She was practically running toward the bunk. Didn't turn around. Didn't check my face to see if I was okay.
Good. That's the whole point.
Our oldest was finishing up a summer class and was as snug as a bug with her grandparents. So… we had some time.
Mark and I got back in the car, looked at each other, and realized we had nowhere to be. No pickup. No practice. No one asks what's for dinner. So we drove up into the mountains and just... stayed there. Bad reception. No real plan.
I missed our dogs so much. I kept reaching for my phone to check on them.
And underneath that — underneath the quiet — something else showed up that I was not expecting.
Me.
Just me. My thoughts. My feelings. No schedule to manage. It had been so long since I'd actually been alone with myself that it felt uncomfortable. Genuinely uncomfortable. Like sitting in a room where the noise finally cuts out and your ears ring for a second before they adjust.
I coached myself through it. I slowed myself down, on purpose, over and over. I let myself think instead of doing.
And when it's quiet, it turns out a lot comes up.
Old thoughts. Old questions. The ones I'd been outrunning with a full calendar.
Here's what I've learned, both in my own life and from the women I work with every week: we fill the silence because the silence asks something of us. It asks who you are when nobody needs anything from you. It asks what you actually feel, not what you should feel. Most of us have not sat with that question in years. Maybe decades.
So we perform instead. We stay useful. We stay busy. We stay "fine." Not because we're shallow — because stillness is where the real inventory happens, and the real inventory is scary.
By the end of that week, something had shifted. Not because we solved anything. We didn't. We just sat in it long enough to remember what our own thoughts sound like without an audience.
And on the other side of that discomfort was something I wasn't expecting either: gratitude. The kind that doesn't need anything else added to it. I looked at Mark, at the mountains, at absolutely nothing on the calendar, and thought — I need nothing more than this.
Why do we push so hard to avoid that feeling?
Why do we perform "okay" instead of just being okay?
I don't have a clean answer. But I know the version of me that came home from those mountains is a version I want to keep.
With so much love, Ali