I started to write my diary at the beginning of the year - every day one entry.
In the beginning it was easy: our life was full of new- new decisions, new discoveries, new emotions, new experiences. Each page seemed to fill itself with the vibrant colors of change, like watching a garden bloom in fast-forward.
It should have been easy to write a travel diary. The world was unfolding before us, each day bringing something worth capturing in words.
In a way yes. And then it can also become challenging. Writing every day is not so straightforward, like trying to catch water with your bare hands - sometimes it flows abundantly, and other times it slips right through your fingers. Many days there is a lot and then comes periods when nothing really moves: inside or outside. The stillness becomes deafening, and the pen feels heavy in hand. There were many days when I got stuck: my inner landscape unfolded in front of me as a blank sheet, a desert waiting for rain. Other days it was so much struggles and periods of reflecting and digesting that it took all my attention leaving me empty with words or simply overwhelmed with everything: thoughts and emotions crashed like waves, one after another, until I could barely keep my head above water. In those states you barely survive one day at a time, so writing is the last thing you find yourself doing. The diary sits untouched, a silent witness to these internal storms.
This year I returned to knitting- something I didn't do for 5 years. You see knitting for me is wonderful but making mistakes and going back to fix them is very discouraging. Each pulled stitch feels like unveiling a part of myself I'd rather keep hidden. At the same time leaving holes and pulled strings is reminding me of those imperfections in myself, like little windows into my vulnerabilities. But now I also understand that imperfections are the essence of being human: me being my unique self. These "flaws" are like the grain in wood that gives it character, the asymmetry in a handmade ceramic bowl that makes it beautiful. And having them gives me edges and depth and I wouldn't be without them - they are the very thing that makes my story worth telling.
Writing for me is like knitting- a stitch-by-stitch process of creating something whole from a single thread of thought. I'm reminded that some days I missed to write something, more than halfway through the process of posting everyday I stopped, and at the end of it I became clear that I missed more than 10 days for one reason or another. But those are like those small details on a blouse: a hole, a skipped thread, a pulled thread, something that I didn't plan or want but it happened. These gaps in my diary are not failures but rather breathing spaces, moments when life demanded to be lived rather than documented.
And that is ok - I am finding my ways of being able to hold it all: the dreams that wake me at night with their intensity, aspirations that pull me forward like invisible strings, decisions that weigh heavy as river stones, ideas and thoughts that flutter like autumn leaves, creations that bloom unexpectedly, and those that never see the daylight, hiding in the shadows of what-could-have-been. I'm learning to hold my failures and mistakes too, not as burdens but as teachers, each one carrying a lesson wrapped in disappointment.
After all I don't want to be perfect or teach my kids that it is something they should strive towards. The pursuit of perfection is like chasing the horizon - always visible but never reachable. Being ourselves- those authentic ones is what matters most, with all our rough edges and unfinished sentences.
This year for me has been giving, fulfilling but at the same time one of the ones with most crises and challenges. Like a tree experiencing all seasons at once - growth and decay, blooming and withering. For me turning 40 wasn't a new blast to discover. I bought that 30's were new 20's just more mature and wiser. I have never felt so good and lived so aligned as in my 30's, when each step seemed to fall naturally into place. Entering a new decade brought some inner struggles and also proofs that changes are underway, like watching the first leaves turn color in late summer. My body was challenged in the ways I didn't try before and word perimenopause came to stay too, an uninvited guest making itself at home in my life's narrative.
A new threshold, a new rite of passage I am moving towards, like crossing a bridge I can't return from. And not every step is light and easy to take - some feel like walking on glass, others like wading through deep water. My kids growing fast are my most vivid proof that the time is passing and there is no returning back. I see it in their lengthening limbs, in the way their questions become more complex, in the growing independence in their eyes. Yet, a dream, an instinct, a desire to have another baby is still present, like a persistent echo in an empty room. It is like that painful spot that is constantly reminding me how soon there is no more time left and leaving that dream once and forever behind it will become a reality one day. Each monthly cycle becomes a countdown, each birthday a milestone marking the distance between desire and possibility.
Point of no return and acceptance of all that is coming with it - this is the dance I'm learning now, stepping between resistance and surrender.
That is my struggle, painted in the colors of autumn: beautiful but tinged with melancholy.
Not being young anymore and not really being at the end but strongly aware of where life is taking me, like being in the middle of a book - too far to start over, not close enough to see the ending. And yet knowing so little, finding wisdom in the admission of uncertainty.
Mostly I know where I am now and how I feel about it: I am learning every day to accept all my emotions and states of mind, to quiet my thoughts and to listen to my heart more. I am leaning into the unknown and accepting what can't be changed, like a river finding its path around immovable stones. Some days this acceptance comes easily, like a gentle rain; other days it feels like trying to embrace a thorny bush.
There are so many possibilities and dreams left, scattered like seeds waiting for their season.
And the uncertainty of those is fine too. Like my knitting- I may never be as good as I want to be but I will still put in the effort and enjoy the process, finding joy in the simple act of creation, in the rhythm of needles clicking together, in the way yarn becomes something new under my hands.
At the end isn't that what life can be too? A collection of moments, some perfectly executed, others beautifully flawed, all woven together into a tapestry that tells our story - not the one we planned, but the one we lived, with all its dropped stitches and unexpected patterns making it uniquely, irrevocably ours.
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