The Surprising Freedom in Not Having Life All Figured Out

“Sometimes you have to let go of the life you planned to make room for the life that’s waiting for you.” ~Joseph Campbell

My new motto? Always have a backup plan.

Life rarely goes as you’d imagined.

January 16^th, 2001. That’s the day my life trajectory changed irrevocably. That’s the day that would lead me to, eventually, living alone—to being divorced. That’s the day my ex had a ski accident that changed the lives of every member of our immediate family. But today, I don’t want to talk about him or that. I want to talk about my …

“Sometimes you have to let go of the life you planned to make room for the life that’s waiting for you.” ~Joseph Campbell

My new motto? Always have a backup plan.

Life rarely goes as you’d imagined.

January 16^th, 2001. That’s the day my life trajectory changed irrevocably. That’s the day that would lead me to, eventually, living alone—to being divorced. That’s the day my ex had a ski accident that changed the lives of every member of our immediate family. But today, I don’t want to talk about him or that. I want to talk about my story, about me. About my aftermath of living alone.

Several years ago, when the last of my daughters graduated from college, loaded her ‘how-can-she-possibly-carry-that!’ backpack, hugged me tight, and boarded a plane for South America with a one-way ticket, I felt a hole in my stomach the size of a meteor crash pit.

I knew so many things at that moment. I knew I had a world of worry ahead of me that would last the duration of her adventure-with-no-end-date.

I knew I’d be going home to an empty house—that was now going to stay empty.

I knew that the axis of my world had suddenly tilted—and nothing would balance the same again.

For years, my married-with-children life had been a whirlwind of stereotypical womanhood: mothering, managing, and multitasking. The house hummed with commotion, packing lunches, planning dinners, visiting teenagers’ shoes haphazardly piled near the front door, family events, lively conversations, and belly laughs—oh, and at a certain point, some derailing by hormone gyrations.

And now? Just me, my omnipresent ADHD-fueled piles of stuff, and a fridge that I wished someone else would clean and organize.

The divorce (after forty years of marriage)? Now, almost a decade in the rearview mirror. The full-time career hustle? Quieted (and mostly regretted). The calendar? More “me-time” than meetings or dates with girlfriends. And let’s not forget the increase in doctors’ appointments compared to before.

On almost every front, I was no longer needed the way I had been.

When my marriage ended, my ex took more than a suitcase and half of our belongings and money. He took our vacations, traditions, and huge parts of my lifestyle—and he unpacked them somewhere new, with someone new.

That reality offered me a chance at a whole new beginning that was all my own but was also utterly unnerving.

Once the noise of change and terrible transitions falls away, what’s left is the deafening question that every fiercely feeling, fabulously flawed woman eventually faces: What do I do with the rest of my life?

The Mirror Doesn’t Lie (But It’s Kind of a Jerk Sometimes)

Here’s the thing nothing can prepare you for when you find yourself alone and start spending real, unfiltered time in solitude:

You meet yourself.

Not the curated version of you that shows up for work, friends, family, or festivities. The real you. The unedited, unmoored, occasionally unhinged version. You with the foibles, flaws, fractures, fixations, fragile truths, and all. At least, that tends to be what you see at first. You’ll also see (sometimes it’s eventually) grace and grit, wisdom and warmth, compassion and courage, intuition and integrity.

And that self you meet, they have questions.

They want to know if you’re proud of how you’ve spent your life. They want to know what you’ve been postponing. And they really want to know why you walked into the kitchen three times today and still forgot what you were looking for.

Being alone strips away distractions. It’s like standing naked in front of a full-length mirror under too-bright lighting. Every flaw feels fluorescent. Every fear comes forward. And every false story and excuse you’ve told yourself asks to be rewritten.

And then there’s the way the outside world begins to see you…

Ma’am? MA’AM?!

I have a <