When I was young, we didn’t have a lot of money. I always loved clothes, but mine were never the coolest, and I always flipped through dELiA*s catalogs thinking, “someday I’m going to buy whatever clothes I want.” I grew up to be a style blogger who got clothes for free. Packages would arrive on my doorstep that were sent to me or that I bought myself, but after a while, my emotional state wouldn’t change when I saw them. I still liked getting dressed, but I also kind of got over it. I got exactly what I wanted, but the feeling I thought I’d have once I did, was fleeting.
When I was a younger mom, all I wanted was a high-heeled job in a high-rise office in the middle of a city. It sounded fun and romantic and like everything I’d hoped for myself as a kid. Eventually I got it. I worked full-time downtown, I solo-mommed our two kids while my husband worked in a neighboring state 6 days a week, and I slowly dissolved in an unhealthy business relationship. I got exactly what I wanted, it WAS fun, and I was also dying a little inside.
The day I chose to leave the job was my first day experiencing true, total, settle-in-every-crevice-of-your-soul, contentment. Almost overnight I stopped looking anywhere else for peace, for validation, for happiness, for confidence. Because almost overnight I had it all.
I became drenched in the potent prosperity of what I already had. In the clothes that were already in my closet. In the old house with carpet in the bathroom, and the dated kitchen, and the sprawling backyard for my babies to twirl in. It was in the being still and KNOWING, in my deepest parts, that I am enough without an asterisk. It was in the unhurried life. In the strawberry from the garden. In the formidable power of my motherhood that I had yet to recognize.
I always feel a little bad when asked if I have any podcast or book recs on finding peace and contentment. I don’t because I didn’t find it in those places – I found mine on the other side of rock bottom. I’ve gotten out of the habit of asking directions for my life from other people & I’m not chasing happiness where it doesn’t live. It’s here. It’s now. In what I already have. In who I already am.
