Yolanda

There is a particular kind of tired that has nothing to do with sleep. I felt it beginning in my forties, and now in my fifties, after decades of being someone’s wife, someone’s mother, someone’s nurse, someone’s advocate. I had spent my whole life taking care of what needed tending. What I had not done, not really, was ask who I was underneath all of that tending.

I grew up believing certain things were simply true. That worth was earned through service. That rest was something you got to later. That the self was a quiet thing you set aside so the people around you could be loud. Those were not lies exactly. They were just incomplete, and I did not know that until I was standing in the middle of my own life wondering where I had gone.

The search did not happen all at once. It happened in the ordinary places, in the mirror, in the space after everyone else had what they needed and I finally sat still. But it found its clearest moment on a mountain in Jamaica, back where Paul’s roots run deepest.

We went to stay, not to visit. Weeks, not days, deep in the hills where the road stops being paved and the air smells like woodsmoke and ripe fruit. I cooked over open flame. I carried water. I slept to the sound of the island instead of a television. And for the first several days, I wanted to leave. I will tell you that honestly. The comfort I had built my whole American life around was gone, and I felt exposed without it, almost angry at how unprepared I was to simply be present with nothing between me and the day.

But something shifts when you stop reaching for what is familiar. The people there did not perform their lives for anyone. They cooked what the land gave them, laughed loud, rested without guilt, and moved through their days with a kind of rooted ease I had forgotten was even possible. I started to remember things about myself that had nothing to do with what I did for other people. I remembered how I liked to sing while I worked. I remembered the particular way my grandmother’s hands moved when she cooked, and how mine moved the same way without me ever having been taught. I remembered that joy did not have to be earned.

By the time we were meant to leave, I was in tears. Not the tears of homesickness I expected on the way in, but the tears of someone who had found a piece of herself she did not know was missing, and did not want to put it back down.

I am still finding her, honestly. That is the part nobody tells you about this stage of life, that the discovery does not end, it simply deepens. But I know her better now than I did before that mountain. I know she is not separate from the woman who tends, who heals, who advocates. She is the reason that woman has anything left to give.

If you are somewhere in your own search right now, wondering where you went and whether you are allowed to go looking for yourself again, I want you to hear this from someone who has stood exactly there. You are allowed. You have always been allowed. And it is never too late to come home to who you actually are.