I’ve been pacing around this issue for weeks. I kick it over to examine it. I poke it with a stick. I feel like I know less about what I am looking at now than I did when things first started to change.

I don’t recognize myself. I don’t know who I am in my career, I don’t know who I am in my marriage and I feel very, very lost. I do not have answers. I do not have direction. The only thing I am sure of is that there is too much on my plate and I don’t like how I feel most of the time.

I am in the middle of a life renovation. I have torn down the walls and ripped up the floors of all the pieces of my life. For the first time, I am truly contemplating what life might be like if I wasn’t a lawyer. For the first time, I am standing in the unbearable insecurity of not knowing how to rebuild my marriage. For the first time, the identities and securities I used to stand behind have dissolved in my hands. It’s just me now, and just me is pretty small and very scared.

The person that is left – when you take away my roles as a wife and mother and lawyer and boss and advocate – that is the person I am interested in. That is the person whom I have neglected for a long time. If I don’t get comfortable with that person, the well will never be deep enough for me to love and give the way I want to in this life.

What is left then, is the task of thinking about what it is like to love that person. Thinking about validating that person, and feeling that she is worthy and enough. It’s not something I am good at. It does not come naturally. I am slowly learning and I am going to be plenty uncomfortable as I try to figure it out.

In the meantime, send me love. Have patience with me when I tell you that I don’t know. (Because I don’t.) This is uncomfortable and scary for me. Have grace. Encourage me to be brave and to collect my strong bits so I can stay curious even when it feels dark and foreboding. Believe in me and remind me to do the same for myself.

Give ‘Em Hell