An Honest Question

There's an ache that comes over me in the quiet. Sometimes it hits in the middle of the day, when my toddler is sleeping and the others are in their bedrooms, playing or reading. Sometimes it happens in the moments before I open my eyes in the morning, but most times it happens at night. This ache urges me to reach out for a fix of something. Validation. Importance. Success.

Like I matter.

Something to make me feel seen.

But so what if I don't?

What if those days are over? I'm not being cathartic. I mean it. What if there's no one else to captivate with my beauty because mine has faded? What if there's no one to astound with my prose because I stop publishing mine?

What if I do that rare thing of buying an old journal and letting all my aches land in pages someone will either rifle through upon my death, or stack into a black bag destined for the dump?

Does that mean my feelings in the moment never existed?

Say I live a quiet life, get quieter with time. It's not that I've lost my voice, I simply choose to speak where I know I'll be heard. I speak into the lives of my children, of my husband, of my friends. Sometimes, into the life of a stranger. Say, I see someone shivering in the cold and I give them my coat. No social media clout. No looking around to see if anyone saw... just being human and treating someone else with the dignity they deserve as a creature made in the image of God.

Say I retreat to a small town, pull my kids out of school and opt to homeschool so that they can learn their base subjects but then have the freedom to chase their dreams and be immersed in their passions. And so what if it means I don't write another book for the next however many years? And so what if I stop going to nail appointments and I do my nails at home? And so what if I take down my socials and have no one to applaud the community service work I'm doing?

Is any of that so bad? To live peacefully? To remove myself from the timelines of people labeled "friends" but who only keep me around so they can snoop on my life? People I have nothing in common with anymore? People who, had I not kept myself tethered to them on the web, would've been left behind in the season in which I knew them, and never been any the wiser?

What if instead of shouting from the rooftop that I don't care what people say about me and adding every hashtag the algorithm is sure to pick up on, and a trending sound to boot, I just...

Log off? Disable? Delete? Renounce?

Is that so bad?

Maybe. Maybe I'll feel unfulfilled. Maybe I'll get bored trying my hand at homemade pies, and give myself the ick when I catch myself dressing head to toe like some crunchy trad wife just to see if it makes my thankless work of endless laundry loads any more glamorous...

But maybe not.

Maybe the work is not the problem. Maybe routine is not the enemy. Maybe it's my view of it all.

Maybe I'll find I really like that I can hear birdsong in the morning when I don't immediately drown my thoughts in doom scrolling upon opening my eyes. Maybe I'll pick up a new hobby... or five.

Maybe I'll be more compassionate toward that woman looking back at me from the mirror with tired eyes but a soft smile because she's doing the things and her kids are happy, and she's not as irritated as she was when she saw them as an inconvenient obstacle to her dreams of climbing some imaginary social ladder.

And who says I can’t be adventurous? I can reach for my husband in the dark with the familiar courage of a woman who knows exactly where she is wanted and how.

The thought of filling my house with good cooking on Thanksgiving and my table with grandkids and great-grandkids... that right there makes me stop and think, "yeah... 'invisible' might not be so bad."

At the end of the day... the garden blooms where it is most watered. So, would watering mine in the places that are quiet in the moment, but result in legacy make me smaller? Or... would it anchor a truth that far outlives my resume?