There are seasons in a life when the questions we are asking quietly change without our noticing. For most of my adult years, I had been asking what I should do next. What to study, what to publish, what to train for, who to become. These were useful questions, and they shaped a productive life. What I am only now beginning to see is that they all rested on an assumption I had never examined. The assumption was that I already knew who I was, and that the work was simply to decide where to take her.
That assumption has quietly fallen apart this year, and the falling apart has turned out to be a kind of gift.
Title: The Ground Beneath
I am sixty years old. I have spent most of my life in the academy, teaching, researching, writing, and contributing across a career largely defined by what I produced. I have been a triathlete for years, and I will represent Canada at the World Championships in September in Aquabike and Sprint events. I have finished my dissertation. I have kept a wellness column for the Kamloops Chronicle. I have loved a man for seven years. I have built a home, a body, and a body of work. I have, by most measures, been doing well.
And yet, quietly and persistently, something in me has been asking for more honesty. No more accomplishments. More honesty. More attention to who is actually living this life from the inside.
Title: Small Acts of Finding
I am, at my core, an introvert, and I am only recently beginning to give that fact the weight it deserves. I draw my energy from solitude, from quiet rooms, from unhurried time with my own thoughts. I prefer to be alone, and for most of my life, I felt a quiet shame about that preference, as if it were a failure of sociability rather than a feature of how I am made. What I am finally letting myself say out loud is that I feel most at peace when I am alone, because I am free from judgment, free from navigating someone else’s expectations, free from worrying that I have said the wrong thing, misread the room, taken up too much space, or taken up too little. I feel at ease with myself. I cause no accidental harm to anyone. I am simply here, in my own company, without the low constant hum of relational vigilance that has followed me through so many rooms in my life.
Title: Watching from the Inside
For much of my career, my work taught me to be extroverted. Teaching demanded it. Meetings demanded it. Conferences and committees and advising and leading all demanded it. I learned to do it, and for a long time, I believed I had genuinely become it. What I am realizing now is that extroversion was a performance I could sustain because I am attuned, capable, and quick in a room, but it was never the truth of my energy. It was a skill I had built at high cost. Every extroverted day drained me in ways my extroverted colleagues seemed to recover from easily. I went home depleted. I ate to fill the hollow. I slept poorly. I found it impossible to understand why other people found the same rooms energizing when I found them exhausting. I thought there was something wrong with me. What was actually wrong was that I was living inside a professional identity that asked the opposite of what my temperament needed, day after day, for decades, and I had no framework for naming the cost.
Title: The Performance of Looking Up
I am naming it now. The solitude I crave is purposeful. It is a love of people, from the right distance. It is a form of connection chosen freely. It is the way my temperament refuels itself, and it is also the space in which I am finally able to be with myself without the exhausting weight of being watched, evaluated, or needed. I have come to believe that my preference for being alone deserves to be honoured rather than apologized for, and that the extroversion I performed for so many years was one of the quieter costs of a working life that was never quite designed for someone built like me.
Title: Rooms I Have Learned to Leave
The deeper looking began, as it often does, with a list. I sat down and wrote out the limiting beliefs I could feel operating underneath my days. There were nine of them by the time I finished. I named them carefully, and I tried to be honest about the ones I was most tempted to skip. The one that had the deepest roots was the belief that my worth was tied to what I produced. Around that belief, I could see that an identity had formed over many years. I had become the one who holds it all together. The woman who could be counted on, who showed up, who carried, who managed, who kept going. That identity had worked well for me. It had also cost me things I am only beginning to add up.
Title: What Has Grown in the Waiting
I decided to sit with that belief and identity honestly and trace them through the different domains of my life.
In my relationships, I have found that I most often show care through doing, giving, and supporting others in tangible ways. The care itself is genuine. It is an expression of something real in me. What I noticed when I looked closely was that this way of expressing care has quietly become a form of currency. Being valued and being useful have become almost the same thing in my interior world. I feel more comfortable offering than receiving. I find it easier to be the person who shows up with a meal, a piece of advice, a note of encouragement, than to be the person who lets someone else show up for me. The cost has been that my relationships have often been anchored in contribution rather than in mutual presence. The polished version of me has gone outward. The unfinished version has stayed private, sometimes even from myself. I am beginning to ask what it would feel like to be valued simply for being present, without producing anything at all. The answer is still ahead of me. The question itself is still new.
Title: What We Carry Forward
In my work, I found that the belief has been both an engine and a weight. It has driven me to achieve and to contribute, and the life that has resulted is one I am genuinely proud of. It has also made rest into something I could only access if I had earned it first. Even moments of stillness have come with conditions. Rest had to be justified by what came before it or what would come after it. The possibility of simply resting, because a human body and mind need rest, has been almost entirely unavailable to me. The belief, I now see, is closely tied to decades of moving through environments that made my place feel conditional. Those environments were real, and the belief was accurate in them. What I am learning is that the environments have changed, and that the belief has quietly persisted past the conditions that produced it. It is doing work that is no longer required.
In my outlook on the world, the belief has shaped how I walk into rooms. Rooms have sometimes felt like assessments. Opportunities have felt like tests. New relationships have felt like introductions I needed to pass. I also hold, in the same heart, a real belief in possibility and in care and in the ordinary goodness of people. Both perspectives live in me at once. What I have begun to notice is that when the limiting belief is loud, I walk past the rooms where I am already welcome. My attention is given entirely to the rooms that are asking me to prove something, and the rooms of welcome stand quietly beside me, unrecognized. I am learning to notice them. I am learning to stay in them longer before reaching for the next thing.
What I am coming to understand is that my beliefs were the interpretations I absorbed along the way about what life required of me. Some of them were accurate. Some of them were distortions. The belief that my worth was tied to what I produced was a distortion. It took something real about who I am, which is a person who genuinely cares about contribution, and it quietly twisted that care into a demand. The care itself is beautiful. The demand attached to it is where the suffering has lived.
Alongside this work, I have been naming my values with a precision I have never given them before. I value care and compassion. I value justice and fairness. I value integrity. I value meaningful contributions. I value growth and self-understanding. I value relationality. I value authenticity. I value resilience and perseverance. I value creativity and expression. These go beyond a list I recite. They are the grain of the wood. They describe a woman oriented toward meaning, depth, and human flourishing. They also ask a great deal of me, and I have been holding them for a long time without quite allowing myself to rest inside them.
Title: The Grain of the Wood
What I want to say, as a closing thought, is that I am writing this as someone still on the way. I am writing it from inside the work. The woman I am becoming is still arranging herself, and she has some distance to travel. She will still be recognizably me. She will still be an introvert who finds her home in solitude. She will still carry the same values she has always carried. But she will move through the world more lightly, with less self-punishment, and with more room to simply exist as the particular person she was made to be. That is the work I am doing this year. That is what all of this has finally been for.
If you are reading this and you are in the middle of your own becoming, I want you to know that your unfinished work is welcome here. You are welcome to speak before you arrive. Figuring it out can come later. You are allowed to be where you are, and to say so out loud, and to trust that the saying itself is part of how you get to wherever you are going.
That is the work. That is all it has ever been.
