The day I thought I fell apart

January 8, 2015.

It had been three weeks since we moved into our new home in our old neighbourhood after living in another province for nine months.

My husband had returned to his remote job in northern Alberta, where he would spend the next ten days. I had dropped our daughter off at her old school to join her new Grade 5 class.

And then I came home.

The house was eerily quiet.

We hadn’t lived there long enough for me to have the choreography of the house figured out yet. I couldn’t put my hand on something without stopping to think about where it belonged.

Every little task seemed to require effort.

My mind was spinning, but I didn’t know what to do next.

I was tired of unpacking. Tired of breaking down cardboard boxes. But without those things to do, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself.

Three months earlier, I had resigned from my part-time job so I would have enough head space to coordinate our move home.

And there had been a lot to coordinate.

My husband had already started his new remote job, so much of the packing and logistics fell to me.

I had taken the lead on packing up a 4,000-square-foot house and moving our family 1,800 kilometres east.

I had dropped my husband at the airport before the sun came up the morning after we took possession of our new house.

I had made Christmas dinner without him there.

And somehow, I had kept moving.

That morning, the quiet was giving me a headache.

So I did what I often did when I needed to feel better.

I got in the shower.

Except this time, as soon as the water hit the top of my head, I completely fell apart.

It was as though the water cracked the shell that had been holding everything together.

The shell that allowed me to keep functioning while life was moving at high speed.

The shell that kept me strong enough to pack the house and manage the move.

The shell that kept me from admitting how much I was struggling with the belief that I hadn’t been strong enough to make our new life work.

The shell that helped me pretend it wasn’t a big deal that my husband was away for Christmas.

That the only tear I had shed was the one that landed in the gravy pot while I was making Christmas dinner.

For years, I thought of that shower as the moment I fell apart.

I don’t anymore.

Looking back, I think it may have been one of the strongest moments of my life.

Because for the first time in a very long time, I wasn’t holding anything together.

I wasn’t solving.

I wasn’t organizing.

I wasn’t making the best of it.

I wasn’t trying to control what happened next.

I was simply allowing myself to be exactly where I was.

And what I wish I could tell that woman now is this:

You are still worthy when you don’t know what to do next.

You are still enough when you can’t see how things are going to turn out.

And keeping a tighter grip on everything will never guarantee the outcome.

I spent a lot of years believing that if I planned carefully enough, worked hard enough, anticipated enough and held everything together well enough, perhaps life would unfold the way I expected it to.

It didn’t.

Life rarely does.

And every time reality moved away from the plan, I had to recalibrate not only the plan, but myself.

I’m learning that strength can look very different from what I once thought it did.

Sometimes strength is taking charge.

Sometimes it is holding everything together because that is what the moment requires.

And sometimes the strongest thing you can do is loosen your grip enough to allow life to show you what is actually happening, instead of exhausting yourself trying to make it become what you thought it should be.

That shower didn’t put me back together.

It would take years to decide which pieces I wanted to pick back up and which ones I was ready to leave behind.

But perhaps that was never weakness.

Perhaps it was the beginning of learning that I didn’t have to hold myself, or my life, quite so tightly.

So maybe the question isn’t, “What will happen if I stop holding all of this together?”

Maybe it’s:

What might become possible if I let myself do it differently?

Take care,

Belinda