Learning To Be Here

There’s a subtle pull I’ve felt my whole life.

A soft, internal gravity that seems to tug not toward anything specific, but just… away from here.

It’s not that I don’t love the life I’ve built or the people in it (I do — intoxicatingly so). But still, there’s a hum underneath it all, like some part of me is always halfway between where I am and where I’ll never quite get. I used to think it meant something was missing. Now, I’m not so sure. Maybe that ache is just part of being alive — an echo of something ancient and unnameable we all carry.

It’s strange how yearning works. It doesn’t always attach to something concrete. It floats. It waits. It morphs. Sometimes it looks like ambition. Sometimes it looks like love. Sometimes it just sits next to you on a normal day, watching you make coffee, asking, “is there more?” And sometimes the answer is no. Sometimes the answer is this is it — this slow, ordinary moment that’s asking nothing of you except to be in it.

So, you learn to be in it.

You walk the long way to the grocery store, past the house with the overgrown grass and the cracked sidewalk. You make eye contact with a stranger at a stop sign and wonder for a second what their life is like. You help someone reach something off a high shelf. You let someone merge in traffic even though you’re already running late. Not because it’s noble, but because it reminds you that we’re all here, doing this strange and beautiful and exhausting thing at the same time.

You find a tiny thing that makes you feel like yourself again. Lighting the candle in your bedroom before bed. Stirring your coffee a little slower. Whispering “I love you” on repeat a thousand times over to your baby when they’re half-asleep in your arms. You give it importance, not because anyone else would, but because you’ve decided to. You just keep showing up for it.

Some days you feel tender enough to cry at a commercial or a song you’ve heard a hundred times before. Or when your mom asks you how you felt about your childhood home. Other days, it builds and builds until you close yourself in the bathroom or find yourself alone in the car and let it out in silence. Both are okay. We cry for a million reasons and most of them don’t have names. Some people need to be alone for it, others want someone sitting on the floor next to them saying nothing at all. There’s no right way to fall apart.

But the world keeps showing up. You start to notice things again. The blasting sunlight hitting every inch of the high rise you and your family currently live in. The way your daughter’s hair smells like grass after playing outside. The fact that a friend just felt like telling you that you were an amazing mother, partner and business owner and ended it with “in case no one has told you lately.” These small, sacred pieces of proof that someone is paying attention to your little life.

You hold love in your hands like it’s fragile, because sometimes it is. And you try to tell the people you love how you feel while you still can.

You start to come back to yourself through nature — not in some romanticized way, but in the realness of it.. the grit of it.

Touching dirt. Watching the sky change. Letting your bare feet find the coolness of grass or tile or sand. You stop demanding clarity and start looking for connection. You realize it’s okay if some memories blur and some dreams fall to the wayside. Not everything is meant to be sought out or remembered. Some forgetting is actually, grace.

You begin to laugh when you’re not supposed to — in moments of grief, in arguments, when everything feels too much — because sometimes that’s the only way to release what’s building. You begin to see your spiraling thoughts not as weakness, but as evidence of how wildly alive your mind is. And you ground yourself not by fixing those thoughts, but by walking into another room, giving yourself space, touching something real and saying to yourself, “I’m okay. I’m still here.”

And when it all feels too heavy or too tender or too uncertain, you write. Not for an audience. Not even for clarity. Just to hear yourself, just to remember that somewhere underneath all the noise, there’s a voice that belongs to you.

You want to make sense of it all, but more than that, you want to truly feel it. So you let yourself. You let the ache in. You let the joy in, too (usually, that’s harder). You become someone who doesn’t just live life, but listens to it. And maybe that’s what we’ve been doing all along — not trying to arrive, but just trying to belong to something. To ourselves.

So here’s to your, to our, arrival.

x, Cassandra