My husband says the word a lot. Seriously — what does it even mean? Stability? Boundaries? Routine? A schedule taped to the fridge? It’s like the word means something different every time it’s said, depending on who’s saying it and what they want.

Another homeschool year starting. The word comes up again. One daughter turning 18 this week, another turning 12 in November. Hubby keeps throwing the word around. I’ve kind of just let him. It’s easier than asking him to define it, which I suspect neither of us wants to do before coffee.

I’ve been trying to learn structure for years. Check back in maybe another five?

We’re getting the place ready to list — so we can have more structure? So my youngest can socialize with kids her own age? I’m not sure. I just want to settle. No more moving around here, there, and everywhere. No more hearing it’s not my business from people who could just, you know, say something kind instead.

Some days you want to scream. Some days you cry. Some days you just have to laugh at the absurdity of it all. That's my grace right now. Well, that and the first sip. The one before anyone's awake. Everything after that is a reheat.

Four kids currently at odds with each other in four different directions. A husband closer to burnt out than either of us wants to name. A body flaring, again, still. A house on the way to a listing. A homeschool year starting up. An eldest turning 18. A youngest turning 12.

And somewhere inside it, we’re supposed to be building structure — a word I’m not sure any of us are defining the same way.

One of these days I'll ask him what he means. Probably not today.

Here’s where things settled, over a coffee that’s still hot: Midlife, But First Coffee.

Two threads live here. Social Graces is for the woman running her business — the strategy, the systems, the half-built funnel, the podcast still on episode 14. Saving Graces is for the woman running her life — the flares, the 4 a.m. wondering, the body that renegotiates its own terms without asking.

Both are me. Neither is separate from the other, no matter how many names I tried on this week looking for a wall between them.

I feel steadier about this one. I’m not going to promise it’s permanent — I’ve promised that before and been wrong within days — but it’s quiet in a way the others weren’t.

Coffee’s hot, for once. Small miracle.

— Grace Sarah☕

The coffee maker was the only thing in this house that didn’t have an opinion about what kind of day we were having.

So I made the pot. Same beans. Same water. Different mug — the light one, because the heavy one felt like a commitment my wrists weren’t ready to make at 6am.

I have four kids who need four different versions of me before 8:30. None of them need me to explain that today’s a sixty-percent day. They already know. They can tell by which mug I’m holding.

This is the part of running a business from home that nobody talks about in their launch strategy. Not the big dramatic pivot. Not the rebrand. The Tuesday morning where you’re sitting at your kitchen table trying to remember your HoneyBook password while your coffee goes cold and your body quietly rewrites the plan you made last night.

I spent years thinking I had to wait until I was a hundred percent to build something. That the business only counts on the days the heavy mug feels fine. That the sixty-percent days were something to push through, not build around.

Turns out, the sixty-percent days are most of them. And the women I want to work with know exactly what I’m talking about.

She’s the coach who rescheduled her own content planning because her brain fog rolled in after lunch. The practitioner who hasn’t updated her website in six months because by the time the kids are down, she’s done. The solopreneur who knows she needs systems but can’t figure out which mug to grab first, let alone which tech platform.

She doesn’t need a ten-module course on productivity. She needs someone who gets it — who knows that some mornings you build the business with the light mug, and some mornings you build it with whatever’s clean.

That’s why I built Social Graces. Strategy, setup, and too much coffee for the woman solopreneur done being her industry’s best-kept secret — even on the days she’s running at sixty percent.

Same coffee. Different mug. We work with what we’ve got.

— Grace Sarah☕

The coffee's always on. Reply anytime.

So you start with the emails. Halfway through the second one you remember the invoice. You open your invoicing tool and realize you never logged last week’s session. Now you’re in your notes trying to find the date. Your phone buzzes — another DM. You glance at the clock.

8:47.

You haven’t prepped for your 9 o’clock. You haven’t eaten. Your coffee is sitting on the counter and it was hot at some point but that point was twenty minutes ago.

You close everything, pull up your client’s file, and shift into session mode. The session goes great. You’re good at this part. You’ve always been good at this part.

Then the session ends. And you sit back down to the same pile you left at 8:47, except now it’s 10am and there are two new emails.

This isn’t a time management problem. This isn’t a discipline problem. This is what happens when one person is the practitioner, the admin department, the content team, the bookkeeper, and the follow-up system all at once.

The sessions are the work. Everything between them is the weight.

And the weight doesn’t get lighter just because you’re good at carrying it.

If this is your Monday — every Monday — something has to come off the pile. Not a better system. Not a new app. A person.

That’s what Chaos to Grace is. I take the operational weight off coaches and practitioners so they can stay in the room.

If you want to talk about what that looks like for your business, book The Thirty. Thirty minutes, free, no pitch.

Book the Thirty

— Grace Sarah☕

one is a recipe i was going to make for dinner three days ago. one is a squarespace page i opened with the full intention of updating my bio. one is a google doc i named “july content plan” that contains exactly one bullet point and the bullet point just says “coffee.”

the rest are a mystery. the browser remembers what i was doing even when i don’t, which is more than i can say for my actual brain on most tuesdays.

brain fog doesn’t announce itself. it doesn’t walk in and say hey, just so you know, you’re going to open a tab, forget why, open another one to figure out the first one, and then forget both. it just — happens. you’re mid-thought and then you’re not. you’re reading a sentence and by the end of it you’ve forgotten the beginning. you’re holding your coffee and wondering if this is the first cup or the second one and honestly it doesn’t matter because it’s cold either way.

the tabs are a symptom. not of disorganisation — of a brain that’s trying to hold everything at once because it knows it might not be able to hold any of it in ten minutes.

so you open tabs like insurance. you leave them there because closing one feels like losing something you might not get back. the recipe stays open because if you close it you’ll never find it again and then tuesday’s dinner becomes cereal. again.

my kids don’t know what brain fog is. they know mom sometimes asks the same question twice. they know i write things on my hand and then wash my hands. they know that when i’m standing in the kitchen looking at nothing, i’m not relaxing — i’m trying to remember what i came in for.

perimenopause made it worse. or maybe fibro made it worse and perimenopause just piled on. hard to tell whose fault it is when they’re both sitting in the same brain pretending they don’t know each other.

i had a thought ten minutes ago that i was going to put in this post. it’s gone. genuinely gone. i’m not being wry about that one — it’s just gone.

the coffee went cold during tab four. i reheated it during tab nine. it’s cold again now. i’m going to leave it. some days the win is just not closing all seventeen tabs in a rage and calling it a fresh start.

they can stay open. i’ll get to them. maybe not today. maybe not this version of my brain. but the tabs will be there, holding the thread until i can pick it back up.

same coffee. still cold. tabs still open.

The coffee's always on.

my husband said something to me ten minutes ago.

i know this because he’s looking at me like he’s waiting for an answer. and i’m looking at him like i’m definitely a person who heard what he said. and we’re both standing in the kitchen performing a version of a conversation that one of us is no longer part of.

i have no idea what he said.

this is not a marriage problem. this is a ten-minutes problem. ten minutes is exactly how long it takes for the coffee to go from hot to forgotten and for my brain to do the same thing to whatever was happening around it.

i made the coffee at 7:12. i know this because i looked at the clock and thought, i’ll drink this while it’s hot. that was the whole plan. one cup. hot. present. ten minutes later i found it on the counter next to the toaster, stone cold, like it had been there for hours. it had been there for ten minutes. ten minutes is apparently all my brain needs to leave the building entirely.

the conversation with my husband was somewhere in those ten minutes. so was a thought about dinner. so was something one of the kids said from the other room that i responded to on autopilot — a “mhmm” that could have been agreeing to anything. a sleepover. a tattoo. a horse. i’ll never know.

he’s used to it by now. not in a sad way — in a tuesday way. the way you get used to the fact that the woman you married will occasionally stare through you like you’re a window she forgot she opened. he just waits. sometimes he repeats it. sometimes he says “you’re gone again, aren’t you” and i say “i was never here” and we both pretend that’s a joke.

fibro fog and perimenopause fog in the same brain is a party nobody asked to attend. one of them steals the words mid-sentence. the other one steals the sentence itself. between them i lose about forty minutes of every morning to a version of me that’s technically conscious but wouldn’t hold up in court.

the coffee is cold again. i don’t know when that happened. i’m going to reheat it and pretend this is the first time, which is what i do with most things now — experience them like they’re new because i genuinely cannot confirm whether they’ve happened before.

he’s still in the kitchen. i’m going to ask him what he said. he’s going to tell me. i’m going to nod like i’m storing it somewhere safe.

we both know where it’s going.

same place as the coffee.

The coffee's always on. Reply anytime.

it’s not by choice. the puppy decided 5:52am was an acceptable time to start licking my face, which is one of several ways this house tells me the day has started whether i agreed to it or not.

so i’m awake. flare’s already introduced itself — knees first, then the lower back, like they’re taking turns announcing themselves at a meeting nobody scheduled. i lie there doing the inventory. knees, yes. back, yes. brain, tbd. body’s clocked in. i haven’t.

i get up anyway. make the coffee. same beans, same water, same five seconds of stirring before i walk away and forget it exists. i tell myself i’ll drink it hot this time. i’ve told myself that every day for six years and i have never once believed it.

while it brews i check the account. i don’t know why i do this to myself before caffeine. the number’s the number. it’s not good news and it’s not a crisis, it’s just a number sitting there being honest about where things stand, which is more than i can say for most of my to-do list.

the eleven year old needs a permission slip signed. the eighteen year old needs the car and a conversation i’m not ready to have before 7am. the twenty year old needs nothing from me this morning, which is its own kind of loud.

none of them know the flare’s here yet. they’ll find out the way they always do — by which mug i’m holding, or by the fact that i answer the same question twice.

i don’t have a plan for today. i have a flare, a number in an account, and three kids who need three different things before breakfast. that’s not nothing. that’s just today.

so i keep sipping. lukewarm coffee, no plan, three kids, one flare. same as always.

The Coffee’s always on. Reply anytime

Grace Sarah☕

That’s the thing I keep coming back to. I wanted there to be one — some specific Tuesday where I looked at the plan and said no, actually, not this and meant it and walked away cleanly. That would have been easier to write about. Easier to live, probably.

Instead there were many moments. Small ones mostly. A wall I hit and rebuilt around. A plan that almost worked and then didn’t. A version of the thing that looked right until it didn’t anymore. Each one felt like maybe this was the moment — the one where I finally saw it clearly enough to actually change direction.

And then I was back in the loop.

I’ve done this enough times now that I can almost feel it before I’m in it. The reaching. The almost. The quiet recalibration I told myself was progress. Almost.

The hard part isn’t the recognizing. It’s that recognizing it doesn’t stop it. You see the shape of the thing and you think this time and then you’re in it again anyway, with great commitment and the same moderate results, holding a lukewarm mug wondering how you got here so fast.

I’ve been quietly letting go of a version of success for years. Not all at once. In increments small enough that I could tell myself I was just adjusting, recalibrating, being sensible. Reasonable words for what was actually a slow grief I wasn’t ready to name yet.

The version I was working toward was — something. Tidier than this. The kind where you’d know when you got there because it would feel unmistakably different from the bottom of the cup.

Maybe that’s what the many moments were. Not failures. Not false starts. Just the slow work of letting go of a version that was never quite going to fit the life I was actually living.

I’m still figuring out if I’m okay with that. Some days I reheat the idea and it still works. Some days I tip it out and start fresh. Most days I’m somewhere in the middle, hand around a warm mug, trying to decide.

Sit at my desk. Take a breath. Just the one.

Then I drink my coffee while it’s still hot, which — if I’m honest — I don’t always manage.

I’ve been going in circles for six years. MVAs. Courses. Trainings. Jobs I talked myself into and out of. The social media hamster wheel I climbed off dramatically and then quietly climbed back onto three months later like nobody would notice. The website I said a firm, decisive no to. The website I then built. The pushing and the crashing. The pushing and the crashing. The new plan that was definitely going to be different from the last plan.

Round and round.

From the inside it feels like reaching for something and just missing it, over and over, with great commitment and moderate results.

Here’s the thing about coffee going cold. It doesn’t announce itself. You’re in the middle of something — the email, the idea, the very important internal debate about whether this time you’ve finally figured it out — and you reach for the mug and it’s just. Not what it was. Lukewarm at best. You don’t know exactly when it happened. You were busy. You were trying. The warmth left while you weren’t paying attention and now you’re holding a cup of good intentions gone tepid.

I’ve done that with whole years.

The bottom of the cup has a specific feeling. Not failure exactly. More like — oh. Here again. Hello.

I’m not alone in this. I know I’m not. There are women right in the middle of this same loop — tired of the wheel and also not quite ready to walk away from it, saying no firmly and then yes quietly, pushing and crashing with a kind of stubborn, exhausted love for the life they’re still trying to build.

I’m writing for her.

Also I am her, which is awkward, but here we are.

The coffee goes cold. Sometimes you catch it in time. Sometimes you’re already at the bottom of the cup asking yourself where it all went.

You reheat it and start again.

I had built it over the course of an afternoon in March, when my pain levels were a four and the light through the bedroom window was doing something nice and I had two and a half hours of good brain to spend. I color-coded it. I put in formulas. I accounted for the monthly Costco run and the power bill I’m somehow always a little behind on.

It was, objectively, a good spreadsheet.

By May, it was fiction.

The spending was fine. The decisions were fine. April just didn’t pay out the way I planned. A payment I was expecting didn’t show up, and suddenly the spreadsheet was describing someone else’s month. The formulas were still there. The categories were still color-coded. The numbers just didn’t match anymore.

I’ve been managing money — mostly my own, often on a shoestring — for most of my adult life. Years of tight months and hard math and figuring out what actually holds when there isn’t much room for error.

Things are better now. Noticeably, gratefully better. But I still remember what it felt like when they weren’t — and I still live in a body that can change the variables without warning.

Years later and I’m still figuring out the budget. Still finding the rhythm. That’s the whole truth of it.

Most financial advice is written for people whose baseline is stable. You earn approximately this much, you spend approximately this much, you plan for the gaps. The math assumes a predictability that chronic illness doesn’t offer. It assumes you can reliably produce the income you planned for. It assumes a bad month is an exception, not a recurring feature of your operating system.

For a lot of us, a bad month is just October.

Or April. Or June. Or the six weeks after a flare that started as one bad day and became a whole new reality you hadn’t budgeted for.

Years of figuring out what works when the standard advice doesn’t apply. A lot of months where the spreadsheet didn’t match reality.

What works. What doesn’t. What I’m still sorting out. It’ll all be here.

Same cup. Just reheated.

It started with my body making a decision my calendar hadn’t planned for. A collision. A full stop. I was already in a stretch that was costing me more than I was letting on — something in my work environment doing slow, quiet damage that I’d gotten very good at not naming out loud. The stop just made pretending inconvenient.

So I took a year off. Which sounds peaceful. It wasn’t particularly.

In that year I got certified as a life coach, felt the rush of it, then sat down to actually build something and discovered that the content, the marketing, the strategy — all of it made me want to lie down somewhere and not get up. So I pivoted to building websites on Squarespace, which felt logical at the time and is harder to explain now. That went somewhere for a while. Then it didn’t. Then the body stopped me again. Same message, louder this time.

I kept going. Chased the strategies. Tried the templates. Stayed on the content treadmill long enough to understand that the treadmill was the problem — that all the chasing was keeping me from the only thing I actually had to offer, which was never the strategy and always the honesty.

A few months ago I found Substack. Started writing. Started finding the women I had apparently been looking for the whole time without knowing their address. And something that had been running on friction for years got quieter. Not fixed. Just quieter.

Here is what I know now that I didn’t know then: there weren’t multiple versions of me trying to find the right one. There was the woman before He found her, and there is the one He already knew she’d be. The one sitting here with reheated coffee and an unfinished road and more grace than she probably deserves on a Tuesday. The pivots, the collisions, the treadmill, the lost years — none of it was a detour. It was just the way here.

Six years in and I still don’t have it figured out. I’m doing it one reheated cup at a time, one grace at a time. That’s actually what I called the thing I’m building — A Shot of Grace. Felt like the most honest name I had.

I made a one-page thing. It’s called When Your Body Has Other Plans, and it is not a wellness checklist. There’s no advice in it. No plan. No better version of yourself waiting at the end.

Just three sections — Let Go, Keep, and Know — and some honest things worth sitting with over something warm, ideally reheated at least once.

Let is for the things you’ve been white-knuckling.
Keep is for the things that are still true.
Know is for the things nobody says out loud.

It’s free and it’s yours if you want it. Download link is below.

No obligation. No optimism required.
Just a page and a cup of something, if that’s what today is.

get it here

There’s a specific kind of day that isn’t anything yet.

Not bad. Not good. The kind where nothing has gone wrong exactly, but you’ve spent most of it making small adjustments — rearranging yourself in a chair fourteen times looking for the position that costs the least, talking yourself through the kitchen and back again, rationing the afternoon like you’re not sure there’s enough of it left.

The in-between day. Most days are this.

I make the coffee in the morning — this is non-negotiable, it is the first act of optimism in a day that hasn’t yet revealed itself — and I carry it to wherever I’m going to be, and I set it down, and then my body has a thought and I follow it somewhere else, and by the time I’m back the coffee has done what coffee does.

I reheat it. I always reheat it. Not because I’ve made peace with cold coffee but because I still want it, and wanting it still matters to me. That distinction feels important in a way I’m still working out.

Here’s the thing about living inside a body with a mind of its own: it doesn’t stop you wanting things.

I thought for a long time that learning to live with limitation was about wanting less. Adjusting your expectations down to meet your capacity. Trimming the life to fit the body.

And there’s some of that. There are things I’ve put down and not picked back up. There are versions of days I don’t have access to anymore.

But the wanting didn’t go with them. The coffee still smells the same. The morning still has that particular quality — the early light, the quiet — that makes me want to be in it. The life I’m living, reheated and renegotiated as it is, still has things in it I want to be present for.

Wanting things inside a life that can’t always deliver them is its own kind of strange. It’s also, I think, the whole point.

I’ve started paying attention to what the wanting actually looks like on the in-between days — and it’s smaller than I expected. It’s not wanting the life back. It’s wanting the second cup. It’s wanting to finish the thought. It’s wanting to sit in a patch of light for ten minutes without owing it to anyone.

Small wants. Still there. Still mine.

On the days when you can’t access the big things — the plans, the capacity, the version of yourself you were counting on — the small wanting is still a form of being alive in your life. Not a consolation prize. The actual thing.

What are you still wanting, even now? Not asking you to answer it out loud. Just — let it be there for a minute.

I’m writing this from inside one of the in-between days. The coffee has been reheated twice. It’s May in the prairies and it’s snowing — actual snow, the kind that has no business being here — and somehow that feels exactly right for what I’m trying to say.

I don’t have a tidy way to end this. That’s the thing about the in-between days — they don’t end so much as become the next one. You carry the cup into tomorrow. You still want it warm.

That feels like enough.

— Grace Sarah ☕

I’ve been having this negotiation for years. Long enough that it doesn’t feel strange anymore, which is something.

I have a body with a mind of it’s own. About temperature, about sleep, about what counts as “doing too much” — a category that has expanded considerably since my early forties and now includes things like standing in the kitchen too long or caring about something past 8pm. Menopause showed up a while back and added several new clauses to the existing agreement, most of them non-negotiable.

None of this is what I planned. I don’t think I exactly planned anything, but I definitely didn’t plan this.

What I did plan, vaguely, was to be someone who had a hot coffee in the morning. Who sat with it. Who was the kind of person a hot coffee implied — unhurried, present, in possession of a morning that belonged to her.

What actually happens is that I make the coffee, set it down somewhere sensible, and find it an hour later doing what it does. Still there. Still mine. Just not what it was when I started.

And I don’t know. There’s something in that I keep coming back to.

The negotiation with my body is not a war. The language around chronic illness loves a battle metaphor and I’ve never found it useful. My body is not the enemy. It’s more like a long-term roommate with very specific needs who communicates primarily through inconvenience and has strong feelings about the thermostat.

We’ve developed an understanding, my body and I. Not a peaceful one, necessarily. Not resolved. But a working one — the way a lot of the things I live inside are working. Functional enough, real enough, and occasionally, in certain lights, kind of funny.

The funny part matters to me. I’ve noticed that the women who get it tend to laugh in the same places I do. The particular exhaustion of explaining yourself to a doctor who has already decided. The good day that arrives without warning and disappears the same way. The way you learn to hold plans loosely, which sounds like wisdom until you realize it’s just logistics.

I’m writing this on a morning somewhere in the middle of the negotiation. Not a bad day. Not a good one. One of the in-between days, which are actually most of them — and that’s the part nobody really writes about. Not because it’s too hard, but because it’s not vivid enough to explain and not fine enough to skip over.

My coffee is already cooling.

I’m going to drink it anyway, reheated or not, because that’s the thing about living in a body you’re constantly working out terms with — you still want the coffee. You still want the morning. You still want to sit with something warm and call it yours, even if it’s not exactly what you pictured.

Maybe especially then.

That’s mostly what I write about here. The in-between days. The negotiation. The reheated cup and what it means to still want it.

Not because I’ve figured it out. I haven’t. I’m still in the middle of a body that changed the rules, still working out what I think about a faith that got complicated, still on the acreage in the prairies where the winters are long and the coffee gets cold fast and somehow that all feels right for what I’m trying to say.

If you’re also somewhere between cups — come back whenever yours needs reheating. I’ll be here doing the same thing.

— Grace Sarah ☕

It was a year of sitting with things, turning them over, noticing what didn’t hold up when I looked at it too long. The kind of slow unraveling you don’t always recognize until you’re already mostly undone.

I’d left the building a long time ago. Stopped showing up in an actual church the way I once had. But the theology — the framework, the language, the things I’d been taught to believe — that took longer to examine. Longer to admit I was examining at all.

And what I kept finding, the longer I sat with it, was what wasn’t there.

Not in the Lord. In the institution. In the messages that kept getting repackaged and rebranded and served back up as if they were the thing itself. As if the Lord’s word wasn’t sufficient on its own. As if it needed a new coat of paint every season to keep people in the seats.

A lot of what I was handed wasn’t actually the gospel. It was the gospel as filtered through people who also had something to protect. Who needed the message to land a their way. Who left things out. Quietly. Consistently. Deliberately.

The world has changed. A lot of the church has not — or has changed only enough to look like it has. Same message, new branding. As if the original wasn’t enough.

That’s what bothers me most. The suggestion, underneath all of it, that what the Lord actually said needed improving.

So I stopped looking there.

Now it’s just me and my coffee and a quiet that finally has some room in it. And somewhere in that quiet, he’s still here. Not dressed up. Not rebranded.

Just here.

Turns out that’s all I ever needed.

Not because I didn’t have things to say. I had too many things to say and not quite enough certainty that anyone needed to hear them. So it sat. In a folder. In the back of my head. In the pile of things I kept meaning to get to once life settled down a little.

Life did not settle down.

So I hit record anyway.

This first episode is about the thing that’s been making me sit down and actually start — which is the quiet, ordinary experience of living in a body that stopped taking orders. Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just slowly, persistently, in the most Tuesday-morning kind of way.

It’s about the unspoken contract most of us have with our bodies — the one we didn’t know we’d signed until it broke. The grief that doesn’t have a clean name. The negotiation that happens at the kitchen table at 6am over a cup you’ve already reheated twice.

It’s about coming to terms. Sort of. Imperfectly. Which is the only honest way I know how to do it.

This is Midlife, Reheated. I’m glad you’re here.

Go finish that coffee.

Because I know what I chose. What I’m less sure about is what to do with the pieces of her that still show up.

When I try to use the word shedding… something in me goes quiet and unconvinced.

—

Some of what I let go, I had to. A reckoning that was a long time coming…

It was something I couldn’t hold onto anymore.

My choices had a say in it. The people I love had a say in it. The Lord had a say in it.

And I followed… sometimes gracefully, sometimes not.

That kind of letting go doesn’t feel like shedding. It feels more like finally telling the truth.

—

There was a version of me I didn’t so much shed as… stop being able to sustain.

It didn’t feel like releasing. It felt more like running out of road.

And what came after wasn’t heavier, exactly. There was lightness in it — real lightness and grace. Grace that still carries me through the days when some of those pieces find their way back.

For some, shedding is a quiet, conscious unclenching.. I’ve just never been sure it’s what happened to me — or if what happened to me even has a clean word for it.

The tension I keep feeling isn’t with the idea of letting go. It’s with the way we talk about it — like it’s always chosen, always freeing, always pointing somewhere better.

Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s just what’s left when something finally gives way.

—

I let her go. Some pieces still find their way back. And I’m not sure that ever fully stops.

I’ve made a kind of peace with that.

—

Am I forcing my way through the day… or moving with what’s actually here?

Am I waiting for a version of me that has this all figured out…
or allowing myself to be still?

—

Small moments. Some that feel like joy.

They show up quietly:

when I stop worrying that she’s going to come back
when I let something be unfinished
when I don’t rush myself past what I’m feeling

when I take a sip of coffee that’s gone cold… and stay anyway

—

Just noticing where the words fall short.

—

Maybe that’s what this is.

Not shedding. Not becoming.

Just… learning to be me in this moment.

—

Maybe you too are somewhere between what you’ve let go of and what hasn’t gone anywhere

I wonder where you are with all of it.

In that time, I have made and kept three appointments with Josie.

Between those three appointments, we have tried at least three different shades each time — warm, warmer, actually can we go back to the first one — because apparently I have opinions about this that I am not fully in charge of, and I would like them to be correct, and they keep not being.

This is not a story about finally deciding. I haven’t. This is a story about the gap between the woman I keep saying I’m going to become and the woman who picks up her phone every six to eight weeks and books another round.

I started going grey at twenty-nine. Just a few strands, early arrivals, the kind you find and consider pulling out before you’ve fully decided how you feel about them. I’d been colouring my hair since I was sixteen — not because I was going grey then, just because that’s what you did, that’s what we did, that’s what the magazines said you could do to yourself and call it a Saturday. So by the time the grey actually showed up, the salon was already a standing arrangement. The grey just slotted in. Became part of the reason instead of a hobby.

For years it was easy not to think about it too hard. The grey was there. I covered it. On to the next thing.

And then at some point — gradually, and then all at once, the way these things go — the grey was there. Rooted in. Committed. And I was still showing up, still sitting in Josie’s chair, still saying yes to another shade, and somewhere underneath that yes was a question I hadn’t quite let myself ask.

Here’s the part I don’t talk about much.

My mother never coloured her hair. Not once, not ever. She just didn’t believe in it — that was her phrase, I don’t believe in it, like it was a theological position, which honestly maybe it was. My sister and I used to bug her about it. Just try it, Mum. Just once. You’d look so good. She would look at us with the particular patience of a woman who had already decided who she was and found our opinions on the matter genuinely puzzling.

She wasn’t making a statement. She just didn’t want to. She thought we should accept her as she was.

I think about that a lot now, sitting in Josie’s chair.

I was the one saying just let it go. I was sixteen, twenty, twenty-five, standing on the other side of this exact conversation, completely certain that the grey didn’t matter and she should just relax about it — except she wasn’t the one who wasn’t relaxed. That was me. Projecting something I couldn’t name yet onto a woman who had already quietly resolved it.

And here I am. Forty-something. Still booking.

I owe my mother an apology and also, probably, a phone call.

What I tell myself is that I’m not ready.

What I’m less sure about is what I’m not ready for, exactly.

Because it’s not the grey itself. I know women with grey hair who look like themselves — finally, completely, like the outside caught up with something the inside already knew. I look at them and feel something I can only describe as a kind of longing. I want to be them. I am also, still, in Josie’s calendar.

So it’s not the grey.

I think it’s the decision.

Not the one about hair. The one underneath it.

I’ve been colouring my hair for over thirty years. Thirty years of choosing a version of myself, appointment by appointment, shade by shade — this one, no that one, actually let’s try warmer — without ever fully realising that’s what I was doing. There’s something in that I’m not ready to put down. Not because the colour is so important, but because the act of it — the choosing, the maintaining, the showing up and saying this, still this — is its own kind of anchor. I know who I am with this hair. I’ve known her for a long time.

Letting the grey come in isn’t just a style decision. It’s agreeing to meet a version of myself I haven’t introduced myself to yet. And I don’t know if I’ll recognise her. I don’t know if she’ll feel like mine.

My mother already knew who she was. She didn’t need to try three shades to figure it out.

I’m still working on it.

There’s also the thing about time.

Going grey when you’re twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-five — there’s something in that that feels like you arrived early to a party you weren’t sure you’d been invited to. Like your body didn’t get the memo about the timeline. And I kept showing up to the salon and saying: not yet. Not yet. Not yet.

I’ve said not yet for fifteen years.

And here I am, still saying it, still trying a slightly different shade each time in case the right one finally makes the question go quiet.

The thing about the appointment I keep making is that I haven’t made one in two months.

I don’t know what to do with that yet. It’s not a decision. I haven’t called Josie. I haven’t said to myself: this is it, this is the moment. I’ve just — not called. And the grey is doing what grey does when you stop covering it over. Showing up. Settling in. Getting comfortable like it knew this day was coming even when I didn’t.

My mother never needed any of this. She just looked in the mirror and said: that’s me. Full stop. No follow-up required.

I’m not there yet. But I’m standing somewhere different than I was.

The appointment I keep making — I haven’t made it. Not yet. Not this time.

I don’t know if that’s the beginning of something or just a longer not yet.

Either way, I’m still in it.

Where are you in this negotiation? I’d love to know I’m not the only one.

He’s a good kid. Thoughtful, even. And he had some thoughts about my life.

I want to be careful here, because I love him and I know exactly where it came from — that particular type of worry that comes out as advice. The kind of concern that wears the costume of a suggestion. He meant well. He did. And I knew it in real time, which is maybe the thing I’m actually proud of.

Because I didn’t spiral.

I poured myself a cup of coffee, let it get to that temperature where it’s finally good — not scalding, not lukewarm, just right — and I let it sit. And then I let the whole conversation sit beside it.

There’s a kind of growing that doesn’t come with a celebration.

No one throws you a party when you stop defending yourself in conversations where you used to write a twelve-paragraph internal argument before bed. No one sends flowers when you learn to hold a hard moment without immediately needing to fix it, explain it, or send a follow-up text to smooth it over. There’s no announcement, no milestone, no little blue checkmark that says: she’s doing the work.

It’s just you, and your mug, and a body with opinions, quietly getting it more right than you used to.

I’ve been thinking about the growing-up we do in midlife — the kind that happens after the first round. After the kids, or the career, or the thing that was supposed to be the thing. The growing that happens in the ordinary Tuesday of it all, when nothing is dramatic enough to explain and no one is watching closely enough to notice.

I’m not where I thought I’d be. I don’t have the big house. I don’t have the tidy ending. I’m still in a body that has opinions about everything — the weather, the fatigue, the grocery store lighting. I’m still figuring out who I am on the other side of several things I thought would define me.

But I held that phone call.

I held it without falling into it. Without catastrophizing or people-pleasing or making it mean something about my worth. I just heard it, and let it move through, and made coffee, and kept going.

Nobody’s going to clap for that.

And I think I’m finally okay with that being true.

The growing nobody claps for is still growing. It still counts. Even if the only witness is you, and your mug, and the particular quality of light through your kitchen window at 9 in the morning.

That’s not nothing. That’s actually everything.