July 8, 2026.
I didn’t set out for today to be a before and after day.
And really, not much has changed about life.
Except it also feels like everything has changed.
I used Byron Katie’s The Work to figure out that the entire past four years, I have been attempting to do something with my subconscious that I haven’t really succeeded in the past 28 years to do:
I have been attempting to decide it was okay to not want someone to matter anymore. And, more: I have been attempting to decide that it was okay for me to not matter to them anymore, too.
And, well….. I think today they don’t matter anymore anymore, and equally: it is okay on my end for me to not matter to them anymore, either.
And, well, does that mean that is what true closure looks like? I don’t really know.
Forgiveness is one thing, but forgiveness doesn’t always look like irrelevance.
For a lot of the last several months, forgiveness for me has looked like, well, a trophy. A “Look! I did it! Be proud of me!” kind of thing.
But now, I’m realizing: I’m the protagonist of this story. Antagonists come and go, and that particular antagonist exited stage right a long, long, long time ago.
Almost four years ago I discovered this particular person following me on Linkedin, and that opened a can of worms I never dreamed prior would be opened ever again.
And, actually, that four-year process has brought me to today, where I can decide that it was actually the decision I made, not that person’s actions in any way, that were notable and interesting about the stories in question.
And, well….looking at these situations in that light is a new way of thinking, and it feels like a breath of fresh air in a stagnant coffin.
Because reframing the entire sequence over since 1998, in a “and this is what I did next” kind of way, makes the entire thing seem like a superhero novel, not a tragedy at all.
So…..severing.
I like the photo above, and I’ve taken several in this style on our jaunt to Savannah this week while Jared is at a conference. This particular photo was taken right in our River Street Inn hotel room a few minutes ago.
I figured out finally this morning that the reason I like it is because it resembles my natural, uncorrected severe near-sightedness— it most closely resembles the real way I see the world.
I’m going to be taking an awful lot more photos just in this kind of style moving forward.
And, I got my camera tattoo touched up this morning, and it doesn’t look like a moderately embarrassing mistake anymore, at all— it looks like a beautiful, unique rangefinder.
And you know, the one thing that has struck me also throughout this entire day, is the uncanny prescience of my own intuition. When I shift the story back onto what I did, the thing I come back to is the decision to choose Jared. The reality is that it does send chills down my spine, exactly how casually I dismissed the other guy’s question to talk about marriage in that Marriott hotel room in September of 2003. I don’t recall a long silence before I told him “no,” and that there had been too many lies, and that I was talking to a man (Jared) and I wanted to see where it might go. I didn’t think hard about it, I didn’t get emotional at the time, and I didn’t feel sadness or fear or even consider that that was essentially the end of the road with any future with that man at all.
I simply said, “no,” and went about my life, promptly to go home and message my now husband, to come invite him to meet me in person a week later.
Because that is the intuition that has saved my life more than once.
That is the angle of the stories waiting to be told.
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