In late December, I started teaching myself how to secure my then mid-neck hair up with a hair fork/ French chignon pin.
It took about a month and a half solid to get it right.
I’d been planning to grow my hair out for a good long time, and getting the styling with French pins right bridged the gap of my impatience.
I decided then and there that I was going to grow my hair out, and in my middle aged and elderly years, I am not going to succumb to the expensive pixie or other short chop requiring constant salon visits. And I’m not going to wear it down most of the time, either. I’m going to wear it up 80% of the time. And it will settle long-term somewhere between chest and arm pit length permanently.
And time marched on, and my hair grew, and right now it’s collarbone length. And it drives me crazy most of the time when it is down; I can’t go a full day with a down style.
I sometimes do the now tried-and-true bun twist, and French twist fold now, and sometimes I forget the hair fork and just go with a plain old braid or French braid.
Yesterday, it occurred to me– there is zero reason why, if I know how to navigate a French pin, why at all there has to be an elastic involved in a braid, at all.
And as it happens, this is day 2 hair. And I’d really like to wash it, but I had a dermatology biopsy this morning and I didn’t make it into the shower before my 8 AM appointment, so my hair HAD to go up somehow.
And so, this is today’s style, and this is likely to be the dominant style for a while because it will grow with my hair.
I like styles that don’t give away exactly how long my hair is.
Plus, it’s sort of Victorian-esque, appropriate given the amount of family heirlooms and furniture from that time period in my house, along with the amount of actual family lore from the time swimming around in my brain.
And so: product-wise, there is a tad of Kenra Sugar Spray, Kenra dry shampoo, and Trader Joe’s leave-in conditioner in my hair.
Zero bobby pins, zero elastics, zero hair spray. Just the rosewood hair fork whose tip is visible in the photos. About 4 minutes to get it just right from start to finish; I did have to repeat it twice to get it just right this morning.
Each braid is double braided, and about the nape of my neck, I wound my hair into a bun. I approached the base of the bun with the inverted hair fork from the top right, and flipped it over to point up again to the top right.
I’ve shaken my head pretty good and the top did loosen up to what is visible here, but it’s held for two solid hours at this point so I think I’m good.
“I’m not sorry I have a camera. I am sorry I had severe gear acquisition syndrome for 15 years. I’m not sorry I learned photography; it has been a good exercise for my very, very bored brain over the past decade and a half.
I do love photography.
I did perhaps make a mistake in 2017 or so, in attempting to find a professional vocation in photography, for multiple reasons. And I had gear acquisition syndrome long before 2017.
But, I had to try. My soul had to try to create a paid profession for myself. It was non-optional. Nothing else was working.
The hard work I am doing now is grieving the me that might have had a professional life once upon a time…
Standards. Miss them….
It can both be true that breaking away from any semblance of professional life utterly broke me, while also being true that it was an extreme gift for quality-of-life and family purposes.
Fifteen years later, I am finding that my once meek identity now has severe I-care-not-one-iota streaks.”
And yet another reminder today, that why yes, people who I have supported professionally are incapable of returning the favor.
That text to Jared, about KEH: I was serious.
I very nearly did get in the car to take it all to KEH, leaving Jared to deal with after-school duties despite the fact that he has a meeting about the time I pick Oliver up from school every day.
Jared came home and intervened, making me promise that even if I no longer want to carry my camera everywhere, that I will store my gear and not take it to sell.
Even if we desperately could use the income.
It’s been one after another of “I-can’t-keep-emotional-balance-because-people-are-either-thoughtless-or-needy-in-their-own-ways-and-my-children-do-not-need-me” all. season. long.
And Jared says, given the bizarre circumstances we’ve navigated recently, I am holding myself together well. I have to take his word for it; my world feels like it has fallen apart. But Jared is my emotional barometer and he doesn’t sugarcoat it, not when it comes to my staying in touch with reality.
But, I find myself seeking new safe harbors; feeling adrift almost as much as I did in 2010 or so when my previous social circle fell apart.
I’ll be okay.
I did actually manage pretty awesome cognitive reframing this week, and have had some pretty significant positive clinical milestones. Severe hurt dampens the triumphs, but Jared is right- I really am doing very well all things considered.
It’s been a tough Fall.
And I’m not taking my gear to KEH; we’ll figure out our finances; I’ll remember that I love photography again someday.
But for now, I’m battening down the hatches. It’s incubation season for my heart.
I documented our children’s lives growing up. And our family. And our pets. That’s the good thing.
I sat here, tonight, holding my camera more like a talisman, a comfort object, than the tool it is meant to be.
I’ve sold all except my vintage film cameras and adapted lenses that aren’t worth anything. I’m down to a single midrange body and three lenses, though I toy daily with selling two of the three lenses.
Today, I came really close to carting it all to KEH to sell the whole lot, minus the family pieces that I inherited.
I wish I’d never gotten into photography.
There. I said it here.
I’ve screamed it, sobbed it out loud, to Jared more times than I can count, especially in recent months.
Photography is the reason we have no savings. My obsession with it is largely responsible for the six figures of debt we find ourselves in.
And it’s gotten me nowhere. Even recently, in trying to volunteer to do a good thing: not good enough for whatever reason.
And if I could honestly say that my life was better because of photography, then maybe it’d be different. Except I can think of several that it’s markedly worse.
It’s not fun to be the free community photographer. Good enough for free, sometimes; not good enough to actually pay market value, though. I’m nice. At least I’m nice.
I have difficulty as I get older writing about anniversaries on the day they happen.
But, one of these weekends, Jared and I are going to go spend the night at the downtown Atlanta Ritz-Carlton, just so I can make new memories in a lovely hotel that has an unfortunate association with someone who should be a nobody. A ghost of the past; a stereotypical Generation Joneser, a cliche who clogs my memories.
I mostly want to go back just so I can have one of those yummy room-service double-stacked grilled cheese sandwiches again.
October 20, 2025 was a surreal day.
And, a year out, and a year minus ten days of zero contact, I have found a sense of relief and peace.
It all happened; I am writing about it in fits and starts. My DIY creative non-fiction reads are helping; I am still stumbling through Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir.
And, it’s still pretty darn unbelievable to think, a year out, that the season of contact from August of 2022 to October of 2025 even happened, after a full twelve and a half years of silence prior to that.
A random discovery of a LinkedIn follow that triggered curiosity, and rubbernecking, and nightmares, and contempt, and in great strides, healing.
And stupidly, exposure to somebody else’s issues, re-traumatization for myself, and literal danger.
If you’d told me in July of 2022 how December of 2024 and October of 2025 would play out, there is no universe in which I would have believed you, nor would I have believed that I’d have actually written the note to him that ceased his willingness for contact: a gift from my 45-year-old self to that 19-year-old girl left delusional to sort out what happened in that less-than-fifteen-minute dorm room visit on his birthday.
And here we are, a year of more silence. A blessing. My life in general is better.
The audacity of those who think they are above all reproach still astounds me. It is extremely comforting to realize that his life is a gross caricature of anything worth living; karma is meting out accountability in ways that I couldn’t have asked for any better.
————————
My regular podcast rotations include Anderson Cooper’s All There Is, Jen Hatmaker’s For the Love, Emily P. Freeman’s The Next Right Thing, and Glennon Doyle’s We Can Do Hard Things.
These podcasts and their guests, over the last two years in particular, have really helped me dig out the grief and bring it to the table, in all the messiness.
And reading Anne Lamott and Mary Karr and Stephen King and Melissa Febos has brought a fire to my own history that I am only just beginning to sort out.
There is healing in bringing my story to words.
And as I reparent myself in my late 40s, I whisper through time to that 20-year-old girl who was schlepping back and forth between two different men at two different apartments, each of them considering me their own property and treating me as such, to tell her that she could, and would, do so very much better. That her particular better was more than she could fathom at the time. That no man has a right to do to her what that Joneser did to her. That it might be okay to just head home and tell them both goodbye; that she would do so eventually, anyway.
And it may be true that faced with his actual person last year, I was only able to bring my typical submissive silence–a trauma freeze response interrupting what I might have otherwise said that day.
But I did say my piece, and my truth met with his silence afterward told me that I hit the exact nail on the head with my words. It’s all I needed to know, even as I have been left to tend to my own wounds in the aftermath.
You can’t heal when your feet are still being held to the flames.
And you know, I can’t say I’d have the guts to go back and tell 2022-Caroline to repeat what would follow if I knew then what I know now, but I’m not sorry it happened, even at the particular costs involved.
Because I got my proof that I have the better life. I’m not sure I would have found the peace I have now any other way.
And, money literally cannot buy the peace of mind I’ve found. Or the voice I’ve gained in the process. Or the knowledge that I had the guts to face the predator-who-doesn’t-deserve-ghost-status-because-he’s-barely-a-man and walk away.
Worth it.
Another of those grilled cheese sandwiches at the Ritz really does sound good: soon.
Sometimes I come up with wild ideas. Jared would say this is another of those times. Not the craziest, but up there.
I’ve been on the rampage for optimizing my back situation, and next up was bedding. The following happened as a happy accident due to the storm from Hurricane Isaias, actually.
There’s nothing wrong with our actual king-sized bed for most people; the frame is a lovely gifted set my aunt and uncle gave us that matches the end tables and the dresser. My uncle painted it all to match and it is a lovely ivory. We have zero intention with parting with it.
And the mattress itself is an Ikea mattress we picked up in early 2022, that is one of the firmer spring mattresses Ikea sells, and it has plenty of life in it.
But, I am terrified of storms. Terrified isn’t the best word; it’s the nearest approximation. PTSD-level afraid is more accurate. When I was 10 years old a tornado destroyed a hefty portion of our neighborhood. A house less than 100 yards away from mine was picked up, foundation and all, and jumbled up into the middle of the road.
That kind of picture sticks with a person. I can still see that house sitting in the dawn light, in rubble in the middle of the road, today.
So, when the bad weather with Hurricane Isaias was predicted for Friday night, I was scared to go to sleep. We stayed up until nearly midnight Friday night, and then I set an alarm for 1:50 AM, so I could monitor the weather.
And, I woke up a few minutes before my alarm went off, and, not bothering the sleeping Oliver and Jared, made myself a pallet on the bathroom floor in our room, my go-to spot for storm sleeping these days when I am feeling skittish.
And, I was pretty startled at the comfort level. My hips felt great, as in I was unaware that there was any problem until I laid down on that bathroom floor on my pallet of blankets. I woke up several times, but only because the blankets shifted revealing the cold floor.
But I got to thinking about how good the “hurt” is when I lie down on the floor for my physical therapy exercises, and then I got to researching.
And as it turns out, maybe floor sleeping is not a bad idea in my particular case.
I’d had to trash my yoga mats recently because of cat urine (unfortunate things happened when our cats were unhappier in earlier times), so Jared and I made the trip to TJ Maxx yesterday and I found a PurEarth Harmony Natural Rubber Yoga Mat for $29.99. It’s extra long, too, which is perfect for having room for my pillow.
And last night, I set up this pallet at the foot of our bed for myself, laying out a quilt doubled up over the yoga mat, and a quilt to lie under.
And I did wake up several times in the night, but I discovered at 5 AM that was because I was still cold. Once I grabbed the comforter from our bed at 5 AM, I slept soundly without waking until 8:30 AM.
I’ve discovered several things with this two-night experiment:
First, I can absolutely sleep on both my sides. In the bed, it is uncomfortable to sleep on my right side in any way. On the floor, it is actually more comfortable to lay on my right side than my left, though I can do both in my need to turn myself.
For a little while, I was able to lie there with my bean bag under my right side. Not all night, though.
And at 5 AM, I could feel a difference— a slight twinge of pain, a good sort of pain not injury-like, in my sternum, like it had been stretched out the way it craved to be.
And, before bringing that comforter to the floor for myself at 5 AM this morning, I figured out that my hips absolutely need the unyielding support of a harder surface. We have a firm mattress, but it felt like a soft, unsupportive pillow— a hammock of sorts— to my fused hips in comparison to the yoga mat pallet I made for myself. I had to move back to the floor after trying the bed.
And somewhere in the night, I could feel a good pain twinge in my lower back, a twinge of feeling I don’t normally have.
And laying on my right side on the flat floor, my left lower ribs absolutely are activated in a way that wakes them up. In a way that for once doesn’t feel fingernails-on-a-chalkboard-cringe like the hanging from the Swedish ladder in my bathroom does.
And, surprisingly, it is not hard even at 47 years old with a lifetime of just turning to get out of bed, to get myself off the floor when I need to get up.
And even more surprising: I felt more prepared to move around this morning than I usually do climbing out of the bed.
We’ve got long-term plans for making this a better long-term solution, too: Jared has long found that his tailbone hurts on our current mattress setup. He frequently has to go to another room or the recliner in the living room to sleep.
And, Porter’s room is large enough to accommodate our king-sized bed.
So, a switch may happen between Porter’s bed and our bed. If we re-orient the bed direction in the room to another wall and make the bed switches, there will be just enough room for me to set up my nightly pallet on the far side of the bed and not obstruct a walkway.
The good thing about never getting rid of anything, and being raised with a “musical furniture” sort of mindset in which furniture is just moved around even between households instead of gotten rid of and replaced, is that moving this stuff around is no biggie, and comes naturally.
And I don’t even have to worry about a miniature nightstand for my new setup, because my Rough Cut Designs mini stool is perfect for just this purpose.
And so…a hurricane may have helped my back long-term. We shall see.
Jared thinks I have lost my mind, though.
Hi there– I write daily about midlife, parenting, photography, long marriage, mental health, and everyday adventures.
Two-thirds of my kiddos are off at college, and I am figuring out life by processing out loud.
