When You Stop Being Who Everyone Needs and Start Being Who You Are

What happens when your days lose their rhythm and nothing new has begun.

Our sweet pup in her summer beads.

Polly's beaded Christmas collar still hangs on a hook in my kitchen.

She'd been wearing her Halloween collar when we got the news: a cancerous tumor. Two weeks later, she was decked out in a red and green beaded collar in the veterinary ER, eating an Oreo — once forbidden, now a small kindness — minutes before she would fall into a deep, endless sleep.

Even in her final moments, Polly had a better accessory game than me.

The house got quiet in a way I hadn't expected after Polly was gone.

Not just the quiet of grief, though that, too, but a silence that throws you off balance. The kind that makes you realize just how much of your rhythm had been shaped around someone else.

Every morning walk. Every trip to the kitchen. Every glance toward the door.

Polly was my shadow, my heartbeat, my reason to get outside and greet the day. And when she was gone, the days turned flat. Empty. Unstructured.

The collar still hung, but there was no reason to reach for it.

I didn't expect the stillness to feel familiar.

Because I'd felt it before — when my youngest moved out. When the last backpack disappeared from the hallway. When I realized no one needed me in the same way anymore.

After we moved from Pennsylvania to New Jersey, I was the one languishing. I barely left the house. We adopted Polly from a shelter, though it wasn't really a "we" decision. She was my attempt to create structure again. A way to re-anchor myself.

My husband probably thought I was getting a dog. I was really getting a life coach with four legs and an attitude.

She was the last "someone" I built my days around.

And when she was gone, it hit me: I no longer have to take care of anyone. (Well, except my husband, but he can make his own sandwich and has opposable thumbs, so I'm not counting him.)

I had spent decades showing up, giving, and caretaking for children, for parents, and at work. And in the process, I had stopped listening to my own longings. My creative urges. Myself.

That's when the stuckness began.

Not dramatic. Just… a subtle sense that time was moving and I wasn't. That something had ended, but nothing new had begun.

And I know I'm not the only one.

I've been thinking a lot about what it takes to move through this kind of inertia. Sometimes we need more than just understanding. We need a complete shift in environment, in energy, in the stories we tell ourselves about what's possible.

This week marks the beginning of a 3-part series I'm writing on what it means to be stuck and what it might take to un-stick.

We'll explore what contributes to this strange pause (spoiler: it's not just about retirement or empty nests), what keeps us quietly unhappy, and what kinds of questions might help us loosen the old stories and step into something new.

If you're feeling foggy, restless, or unsure of what comes next, I hope you'll read along. And if something in you is stirring, if you're ready for more than just reading about change, I'm planning something transformative for September. More on that soon.

I'll leave you with this:

Have you ever felt this kind of quiet that's not peace, but absence?

You're not broken.

You're not behind.

You're simply in the in-between.

And that space? It holds possibilities.