I did not realize how much of me the routine was holding.
Not in a bad way, not only. The routine was also a kind of container. The five forty-three and the prep and the commute and the particular sequence of a teaching day, which I did not always love but which organized the hours into a shape I knew, which gave me the satisfaction of a known shape even when the shape was exhausting, because a known exhaustion is easier to manage than an open morning with no scaffolding and no one expecting you to be anywhere by any particular time.
The first year without it I was slightly lost.
I want to say that without shame, though there is residual shame in it, the shame of a woman who spent a career being competent and organized and should therefore be capable of organizing her own freedom, who has read enough about this transition to know that it is normal and still felt abnormal in it. Lost is the word. Not unhappy, not regretting, just without the shape I had been using to know where I was in the day, like navigating a room where someone has rearranged the furniture in the dark.
I built a different shape.
Slowly, trying things and discarding them, the way you build anything without a blueprint, by trial and by the patient accumulation of what works. The water in the morning. The writing before anything else. The walks that have become their own kind of appointment, not to an institution but to the day itself, to the light and the temperature and the condition of the world at eight in the morning, which changes and which I am there to notice changing. The reading in the afternoon. The cooking that is leisure rather than logistics.
The new routine is quieter than the old one.
It is mine in a way the old one was not. It was built around what I need rather than what the institution needed from me, which sounds obvious and simple and is neither. Building a life around what you need, after decades of building it around what was required, is its own kind of work. The most personal work I have ever done. I am still doing it. I expect I will be doing it for the rest of my life, and that feels, finally, like the right kind of work to be doing.
