A new beginning

I haven’t written in so long. I can barely journal. Sometimes I write bullet points down in a composition notebook so that I won’t forget the main details of this time. I miss writing. I miss processing life and sharing my musings with others. My life and I have changed so much, I really don’t know where to begin.

I live alone in a tiny house/camper. I have a short-term lease until the end of March. I left my marriage over a year ago, and life is only recently beginning to feel calmer and grounded. Beginning again in your 50s as a woman is not easy, especially if you never had a career. I hobbled together three jobs that were substitute teaching, being on a catering team with a large local company, and teaching pickleball lessons. I worked those three jobs for about 8 months and then got a job as a full-time housekeeper/nanny for a wonderful family. I have also completed the online learning curriculum for Teachers of Tomorrow and need to take the Praxis exam. That would give me the opportunity for a full-time teaching job in the public schools and certification over three years. I have also been contemplating grad school for social work. These midlife decisions are not easy, and I try to take one day at a time.

I am happy and at peace. More peace than I have ever experienced despite my tenuous circumstances and instability. I listen to my intuition after rejecting it for most of my life. I have experienced deep and profound grief, broken relationships, and the death of my mother on Easter. I have had to look myself in the eye and be brutally honest. Accountability is humbling. Sifting through the ashes of my faith is freeing. The fire has been thorough in its burn.

Home is wherever you create it. I feel at home in my car, with people who know me and accept me as I am, in this cozy space, on a walk, on the pickleball courts. Home doesn’t require stuff or really anything. Feeling at home in your own skin is the best feeling that there is. I create a sense of home wherever I am. I am at home in my small world.

2025 was the best of times and the worst of times. There were moments where I didn’t think I could go on. I was suicidal many times and am thankful for the support of friends who buoyed me. The losses consumed me, and life did not feel worth it. I am ready to see this year close, and yet I respect all the ways in which I have grown this year. I did the hardest things I have ever done. I forged my own trail without help and little support. I stood up for myself after allowing shame to beat me down and make me believe I deserved ill-treatment. I chose forgiveness again and again, beginning with myself. I have become my own best friend, the one that will have my own back, and embracing the reality that “no one is coming to save you”. I see all the ways I have been taught self-abandonment and self-betrayal, and I am learning what it looks like and feels like to stay close to myself and listen well and take care of me. I feel like I am relearning the Aimee of my youth, the one I eventually tried to put to death in the name of religion and co-dependency, and I am embracing her. The good, the bad, and the ugly. I am learning self-compassion where there has been consistent self -flagellation. I see how small I have made myself in ways that are not healthy and true. I adopted narratives about the way I should be, and rejected who I actually am. I am casting off heavy burdens, yokes that have strangled me, and am resting in the messy place that I am with no pressure to “fix”. I am taking my life back to the studs. Ripping down the wallpaper, the walls themselves, tossing the furnishings. I am renovating myself. The real me who is under all the layers I have built up is still there, and I am removing everything so that she can breathe. I am trusting the slow and painful process.

By the way, I have a new Instagram page: realmidliferenovation

I hope to talk with some of you again. And for many of you who were drawn to my old furnishings and ways of being, it’s okay for you to quietly move on. Stop reading or following. We can amicably part ways without a conversation about it.

Much love to all of you wrestling through your own midlife journeys and all the upheaval that can come from that both relationally, hormonally, vocationally, and spiritually. I hope to continue to be a non-anxious presence and to offer kindness and non-judgmental curiosity. Peace, friends.