Taking the hat off

The choices I'm making to stop living small

There was a period of my life when I wore a hat every single day.

I’m not talking about a phase or a season. I mean every day, for years. Having it on let something in me relax a little, like I’d made myself just small enough to get through whatever was ahead. I didn’t have the language for it then, but what I was doing was hiding. Not from other people exactly. More from myself. From having to look too closely at the woman in the mirror and reckon with how far she’d drifted from who she thought she was going to be.

I was exhausted in a way that sleep didn’t fix. My body felt foreign to me. I’d stopped doing my hair, stopped enjoying getting dressed, stopped reaching for the things that used to feel like mine. The little rituals and interests and quirks that made me feel like a person with a specific inner life had slowly gone quiet. I’d lost the thread of myself somewhere and I didn’t know how to find it, so I just kept moving. Hat on. Head down. Get through the day.

It took close to a year, maybe two, to finally get my Hashimoto’s diagnosis. And even then, knowing didn’t fix it. Because here’s the part I don’t hear many people talk about honestly: I chose not to deal with it. I knew what was wrong. I had the name for it. And I still didn’t do anything about it for a long time.

Part of that was the why me feeling that showed up and settled in. My body had been working against me for years, and when I finally understood that, my first response wasn’t to fix it. It was this quiet, stubborn grief. I didn’t want to change how I was doing things. I didn’t want another thing to manage, track or be responsible for. I wanted to be the person who didn’t have to think about any of this. So I just didn’t. I sat with the diagnosis and did very little about it, and kept wearing the hat and kept getting through the days, and called that living.

I’m not proud of that stretch. But I think it’s important to say out loud because I don’t think I’m the only one who has gotten a piece of information that could change things and then quietly put it in a drawer.

Something shifted around thirty-eight. I don’t know exactly what cracked it open. Maybe finally getting serious about treating the Hashimoto’s. Maybe getting married. Maybe just the specific way that approaching forty makes you feel time differently. But I started to feel restless in a way I hadn’t in years. Not the anxious kind of restless. The alive kind. The kind that means something in you is ready to move.

I started noticing the gap between the life I was living and the life I could feel waiting for me if I’d just stop getting in my own way. I’d have these visions of who I wanted to be, how I wanted to move through the world, what I wanted to build, and then I’d pick up my phone, and an hour would disappear. I was spending so much time watching other people live that I’d stopped doing it myself. I’d become, and this is hard to say out loud, a little dull. Not because I’m a dull person. But because I’d outsourced my inner life to a screen and somewhere in there I’d forgotten what I actually found interesting, what I actually wanted, what actually made me feel like me.

What I keep coming back to now is this word: steward. I want to be a good steward of my life. Of my money, my home, my body, my friendships, my marriage, my business, my time. I don’t want to just accumulate days. I want to tend to them. I want to learn to cook really well, write birthday cards, and show up for people in small, thoughtful ways. I want to travel for joy instead of obligation. I want to sit across from my husband at dinner and actually be there, not half somewhere else. I want the things I bring into my life, the objects, the habits, the relationships, to be chosen and not just collected.

That’s what Well Lived means to me right now. Not a perfect life. Not an aspirational one. Just an intentional one. One where I’m making the choices instead of letting the days make them for me.

The hardest part is accountability. It’s so easy to be comfortable. So easy to tell yourself the work starts tomorrow, or that this is just who you are, or that wanting things is enough without doing anything about them. I’ve lived in that story for a long time, and I know how seductive it is. But I also know that the version of myself I most want to leave behind is the one who accepts that story. The one who mistakes laziness for a personality trait instead of a habit. The one who quietly doesn’t believe she can do the things she dreams about doing.

I know I can do hard things. I know I can build something real. I know I’m meant to lead. I’ve known that my whole life, actually, and I’ve spent a lot of years being afraid of what that might ask of me. I’m done being afraid of it.

This newsletter is me figuring out how to close that gap. Between the woman I’ve been and the woman I know I’m becoming. I don’t have it figured out. I’m not writing from the other side. I’m writing from the middle, which is messier, more honest, and probably more useful anyway.

The hat’s been off for a while now. I’m still getting used to it.

-- Melissa