Not the highlight reel of who they were. Not the mythologized version we polish when we are lonely. But the mundane choreography of it. The way their presence quietly dictated where the furniture went inside our days. Inside our bodies.

Where we reached without thinking. When we checked our phone. What time dinner happened. Who we became at 8:47 p.m. on a Tuesday.

There is a kind of intimacy in routine that rarely gets named. It is not dramatic. It does not announce itself. It just… settles in. Like muscle memory. Like the way you know how many steps it takes to cross a familiar room in the dark.

And when that person leaves, the room does not collapse. That is the disorienting part. The room stays standing. The couch is still there. The walls hold. But your body keeps moving as if the furniture hasn’t changed. You reach for a light switch that no longer exists.

I think that is where the ache lives.

We talk a lot about missing who someone was. Their laugh. Their mind. Their way of seeing the world. And sometimes that is true. But sometimes, if I am being honest, what I miss is how my life made sense around them. How their existence quietly answered questions I did not know I was asking.

Who do I text when something small happens.
Who do I tell first.
Who knows the shorthand of this version of me.

Losing that is not romantic. It is logistical. It is having to renegotiate the shape of your own days. It is realizing that your nervous system had made a home somewhere, and now it has to pack up without instructions.

What complicates it further is that when we make room for someone, we rarely make room for who they are frozen in time. We make room for who they might become.

This is the part I keep circling lately.

We do not just rearrange the furniture to fit them. We imagine how the room might look later. We pre-plan for growth. For change. For evolution. We let ourselves get excited about colors we have not seen yet.

And there is something both generous and dangerous about that.

Generous because loving someone often means believing in their becoming. Holding space for versions of them that do not exist yet. Dangerous because you are quietly consenting to a future you cannot control.

You are saying, I will stay even if the walls change color.

Except you do not actually know if you will like the color they choose.

We rarely say that part out loud.

We like the idea of being endlessly adaptable, endlessly open. We want to be the kind of people who grow together, not apart. But there is a private fear tucked underneath that hope. The fear that one day you will look around and realize the room still works, but it no longer feels like yours.

And then what.

When a relationship ends, or a version of someone disappears, I think part of the grief is realizing that the future you had already furnished will never be lived in. You had mentally placed the windows. You knew where the morning light would hit. You had imagined who you would be in that space.

Letting that go is not just losing them. It is losing a version of yourself that only existed in relation to them.

No one really prepares you for that.

We tell people heartbreak is about loss, but we do not talk enough about reorientation. About having to relearn your own internal layout. About asking questions that feel embarrassingly basic, like what do I do with this time now, or who am I without this rhythm.

There is also relief in it, sometimes. Even that feels complicated to admit.

Because sometimes the furniture was heavy. Sometimes you were holding up a wall that was not yours to support. Sometimes the room needed air.

Missing the routine does not always mean the routine was good for you. It just means it was familiar. And familiarity has a gravity of its own.

I am trying to get more honest with myself about what I am actually missing when I miss someone. Whether I miss their essence, or whether I miss the certainty they provided. Whether I miss connection, or whether I miss not having to choose.

There is no moral to that inquiry. No conclusion. Just information.

Because if you can name what you are grieving, you get a little more agency in how you rebuild. You get to decide which pieces of the old room you actually want to carry forward, and which ones you are ready to leave behind.

Maybe that is the quieter work of loving and losing. Not hardening. Not romanticizing. But becoming a more conscious architect of your own inner space.

Letting yourself want connection without outsourcing your sense of home.

Trusting that you can rearrange the furniture again.

And that this time, the room belongs to you first.

to the brave thing,

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This year, I’m alone. And I won’t sit here and pretend I’m not feeling anything about it.

Lately, I’ve been broadening my definition of sadness. Sad, to me, feels sharp and fresh, like a papercut but bigger. Maybe like a cardboard cut if you’ve ever had one of those. Immediate. Demanding attention.

That’s not what this is.

What I feel is older. It aches like longing, but colder. Like the headache the wind chill gives you when your ears stay uncovered for too long. It’s grief. For things that aren’t happening yet. For the things that can’t happen right now. Sad feels like pain before understanding. This has awareness all around it. A hug it doesn’t want.

So much has changed in a year, which somehow feels like both the longest year of my life and the blink of an eye. We’re taught that if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. But I am now living proof that that isn’t the whole truth.

Especially this time of year, those few strange days between Christmas and New Year’s, when the collective “Get It Together” energy descends. The before-and-after mentality ramps up. The resolutions get drafted. The reinventions are outlined. As if we’re all standing in the before, frantically planning for an after we hope will finally make us feel different.

I remember talking with a bartender last January who was half-joking, half-complaining about how everyone’s Dry Januarys and health kicks were going to make it a slow month. I laughed and told him most of those resolutions don’t make it past a few weeks anyway. He looked relieved. I got a free drink out of it. Silly, maybe. But telling.

Here’s the part that matters.

I showed up to this year with no plan.

I talk about this at length in Braver, Not Fearless, but the short version is this: standing on the shoreline in Santa Cruz, California, I made two agreements with myself. I wouldn’t drink myself to death. And I wouldn’t throw myself into the ocean.

That’s bleak. And it’s honest.

Which brings me to the title of this piece. Not before and after. Before and honest.

Not the performance of progress. Not the strategy deck. Just the willingness to stop lying to ourselves long enough to hear what’s actually true. To ourselves first. Then, slowly, to the people who love us. And maybe even to the people who haven’t had the chance to love us yet because they haven’t seen the wizard behind the curtain.

I hesitated to share this next part. Which says a lot, considering how much I’ve already put into the world.

For most of my life, talking about my weight felt like a line I wasn’t allowed to cross. Like acknowledging it would somehow cheapen the persona I had built. The version of me who “didn’t care.” The version who performed confidence so convincingly that even I believed her sometimes.

But performing confidence is not the same as feeling it.

I knew what pride was supposed to look like. I just didn’t recognize it in myself. Like asking someone who’s colorblind to identify blue. They might be able to name it, describe it, even teach it. That doesn’t mean they can see it.

What I saw instead was a girl who was her own harshest critic every time she looked in the mirror. I remember writing in my journal once, If I can’t even get myself to lose this weight, why should anyone listen to anything I have to offer about getting what they want?

So why break my own “we don’t talk about that here” rule now?

First, because honesty is no longer optional for me. It’s not a resolution or an intention. It’s a vow. Honest is the best thing I’ve ever been.

Second, because between this exact moment last year and right now, I’ve lost over forty pounds.

There was no plan. No reinvention arc. No dramatic overhaul.

After I learned I could trust myself to keep my word, I made one simple promise: I would go on daily walks. And while I walked, I would try to get to know the girl underneath the performance without judgment.

I owed her that.

The weight wasn’t the first thing I lost.
It was the stories I kept telling myself about who I was allowed to be.

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Xx, to the brave thing,

P.S. If this piece resonates, my book Braver, Not Fearless goes deeper into the year that changed everything. It’s there if and when you’re ready. 🫶🏼💗