Issue # 10

still becoming

I miss my old life.

All of it.

There wasn’t anything I wanted to change. I was thriving. I had a great partner, a home I loved, creativity, professional success, freedom.

I felt steady. Full. Like I had grown into the version of myself I’d been building for years.

And then... motherhood.

Now I’m someone else. Or I’m becoming someone else. I don’t know yet.

What I do know is that I’m not who I was, and I don’t yet feel fully at home in who I am now.

It’s not exactly grief, though sometimes there’s mourning.

It’s not exactly dissatisfaction, though there are moments of ache.

Mostly, it feels like floating. Or maybe… like blurring.

There are days where I feel like I’m staring into a mirror, but it’s all fogged up from a hot shower. I can see the vague shape of myself, just enough to know I’m there, but no detail. No clarity. No sharp edges.

And I hope that, like a steamed-up mirror eventually clears, I’ll start to feel clearer too. That I’ll see myself more fully again, in whatever new form I’ve become.

This not-knowing, this haziness, has surfaced in every part of my life.

I don’t always know how to show up in my work. I don’t always know how to be a partner. I don’t even always know how to be a friend, or even what kind of friend I need right now.

But I’m slowly learning to accept that.

To stop expecting myself to move the way I did before. To recognize that there are new boundaries forming, and that sometimes, I won’t know where they are until I trip over one.

And weirdly, I’m starting to get comfortable with being a bit undefined.

But that’s where I’m also careful.

A friend recently said something that stuck with me. I'm going to paraphrase a bit here, "Some people get so comfortable in the fog, they never come out of it."

And I don’t want that.

This season, this blur, this in-between, it’s fine as a phase. As a cocoon. As a necessary unfolding.

But eventually?

The mirror does need to clear. I need to come out the other side.
Changed, yes. Softer or harder in ways I can't fathom yet, probably. But me again.

I don’t know who I’m becoming. But I do know I want to meet her.

I was whole before. And I will be whole again.

Even if that wholeness looks different.

Ruminating in the rain,

Aurooba