I sat at home alone on a Saturday morning and tears filled my eyes. At first, I wasn’t even sure why I was crying. After a little more exploration, I was quick to realize that it was all catching up with me.

In the last 30 days, I’ve moved from a house that healed me to a new place with an entirely different way of life. At the old house, we picked up a lot of Johnny’s Pizza. At the new one, there are no quick trips to the store and we cook almost every meal. At the old house, I worked from home all hours of the day. At the new house, cell service is sparse.

In the last 30 days, I planned a trip to Hawaii that we didn’t get to take. Excitement, nervousness, and ultimately, a lot of disappointment surrounded this. The stack of clothes I’d planned to take on what would have been our honeymoon are still stacked together in a suitcase. It’s a suitcase that didn’t get to travel to Hawaii and just moved 30 minutes down the road instead.

In the last 30 days, I got married. Zach and I have been together for a while now and we were great friends long before that. Our lives were pretty intertwined long before we requested a marriage license. Even so, the actual act of getting married, especially when you’ve been divorced, is a huge deal. Even if we had been discussing and planning for it for a long time, it’s still a really big deal.

In the last 30 days, I became a stepmom. I accepted those two kids as my own a long time ago and there’s still something huge about it becoming official. It’s still a big thing to begin living in one house together, something that I was especially emotional about. It’s really hard to explain how similar but also how wildly different things are just because we signed our names to a piece of paper and mailed it to the court house.

In the last 30 days, we’ve all been quarantined to our homes. Businesses are closed. The news runs wild with reports of disease and health risks and what we should or shouldn’t be doing. We went from living full, busy lives to mostly being at home. We’ve switched to online orders instead of Target runs, and we see most of our community wearing masks when we do leave our house. This is a lot to process.

In the last 30 days, I‘ve been challenged with reconfiguring how I do business. What is traditionally my busiest time of year, has become a season where I rethink how I do work. It’s become a season where I learn new ways of doing things and where I work to prepare for the unknown. It’s a season where I’m thankfully still selling a lot of real estate, and it’s still so uncertain. 

The more I think about how much has changed in the last 30 days, the more I wonder how I’ve not already been in tears on this couch. Then, I remember — this is how I do things. When things get tough and unstable, I buckle down and get the job done. I put my head down and take care of everyone else. I organize and plan and spend most of my time getting ducks in a row.

And then, when quiet Saturday mornings come and things settle down just a bit, it’ll all settle on my heart at once. The uncertainty, the anxiety, the happiness and the fear — it all comes together into one swirling tornado of emotion and I cry alone. (Speaking of tornados, we also had one of those come through town in the last 30 days.) In most cases, it feels like relief. Relief from having held it all in for so long, even when I’d been doing that unknowingly. Relief from getting to sit some of the fear and worry to the side for just a minute. Relief from feeling like I can finally stop being strong and courageous for just a moment. No one is watching. I can be scared and confused and exhausted on this couch alone.

I know that it’s not my job to be strong for anyone and that no one even expects this of me. I’ve crashed and burned from not acknowledging my own grief and feelings many times before. I certainly don’t need or want a pep talk about the importance of not doing this or how counterproductive it is. I get it. And still, I’ve handled stress in this way since I was a little girl. I started losing people close to me at 11 years old and that cycle didn’t stop for a long time. I lost someone annually for several years in a row and each death brought with it its own version of chaos and uncertainty. I am simply wired, both by nature and by programming, to figure it out and keep moving.

When I look back on these 30 days in the distant future, I’ll probably chuckle at just how many changes I navigated at once. I’ll easily remember the underlying anxiety that simmered in my chest, almost boiling over daily. I’ll remember how foggy I felt through most of it and how yet again, I persevered through. I’ll add “these days” to the list of crazy stories I’ll be able to tell about my life. There’s a podcast that I listen to where the intro talks about navigating the “messy and the magical” seasons of life. That’s exactly what these 30 days have been — messy and magical.

On this particular Saturday, it was time for me to let it all go. It was time for me to celebrate all of the happiness the last 30 days has brought, and for me to release the tension it brought too. The sun was shining and birds were singing and there was a tiny breeze coming from that one open window. It was time. Time for me to process and release everything from the last 30 days.

Photos: Light + Free Folk