On burnout. On AI. On gardening as meditation. On building things that last. Whatever's on my mind.
This past year has been tough for many people I care about, and to be honest, myself included. People have dealt with sudden unimaginable trauma, long drawn-out illnesses, the loss of parents, children, and spouses. Divorce, job loss, moving away from familiar things.
The other day I told my husband I think I have some sort of deep-seated puritanical guilt about rest. He cackled. I am certainly not a puritan, but I am truly terrible at rest.
When we started building out a subscription consulting program from scratch, many (most?) people were convinced no one would renew. They genuinely believed that after three years, a consultant could teach a customer everything there was to know about the software and that customer would skip off into the sunset, fully self-sufficient, never to need us again. It was a reasonable-sounding argument if you squinted.
Grief is a funny emotion. There's no handbook for it, and even when you think you're done, it can come back with a vengeance when you're least expecting it. It also comes in every size - from the loss of a loved one all the way down to being bummed that your team didn't make the championship. But the strangest type of grief, and probably the hardest for me to process, is grief for a future that could or should have been.
This kind of grief is the hardest to describe, and therefore the hardest to discuss without feeling like a melancholy drama queen. It's opportunity cost that shouldn't even be a consideration - but it is.
You will never forget the moments that define your life forever.
For me, one of those moments was learning I was pregnant. It wasn't beautiful and peaceful like a pregnancy test commercial. It involved taking not one, not two, but three expired pregnancy tests - all positive, all with the same commentary live-streamed via text to my best friend: "WTF?!" It involved being freezing - literally, for the first time ever in my life, unable to warm up - and feeling like I'd been run over by a truck. It involved frantically barging into the bathroom where my husband was getting ready and holding up a stick with two lines on it, minutes before walking out the door for his company Christmas party.
You might not think that sounds out of the ordinary. But "learned" might be underselling it.