How Am I, Really?

My book turned four this week. I thought I'd written a finish line. Turns out I'd planted a question, and I've spent four years following it home.

Naming a book How Are You, Really? comes with a side effect nobody warns you about. People ask you the question. All the time. Nearly every day someone slides up beside me, tilts their head, and goes, how are you, really, like we’re in on a little secret together.

And I love it, I do. I would so much rather hear about the weird mole you should probably get looked at, or the hard conversation you had with your person last night, than talk about the weather or who won the game. Small talk has always made me itch, and I wrote an entire book partly to wiggle my way out of it. So consider this me pulling up a chair next to you, no agenda, just us, the way it used to be.

The night I filed the final manuscript, I thought I’d reached a finish line of sorts. I’d poured myself onto the page across a season of late nights, writing the book I swore up and down I never would, the one I’d convinced myself I didn’t have in me. Putting your insides on a page and handing them to strangers is its own slow, tender labor, and when I finally held the hardcover for the first time it felt like meeting something I’d grown. It felt like the end of a long climb.

What I was so sure was a finish line turned out to be the most beautiful starting line of my life.

Near the end of those pages I’d written that we never fully arrive, that we never stop needing the small nudges to stay awake to our own lives. I believed it when I typed it, and I think I believe it even more now. I just had no idea those last lines were the table of contents for everything that came after.

These days, I don’t keep copies of my own book staged around the house. The one I do have lives on a shelf in my office, a room I barely set foot in anymore, and it isn’t even mine, not really. It was my grandparents’.

They understood that itch in me better than almost anyone, the need to skip the weather and get straight to the good stuff, and they were deep-end people themselves. It’s marked up the way you only mark up something you love, you know the kind, the margins crowded with their notes, little stars beside the lines that landed, an address sticker on the back so it could always find its way home to them.

When my grandpa passed, that copy came home to me, and somewhere along the way I realized it had stopped being a book I wrote and become a book we shared.

So when I pulled it down the other day and read a few pages of myself back to myself, I wasn’t only meeting the woman who wrote it. I was sitting with the two people who loved it most.

And since most writers end up writing the very thing they need most, I took my own advice and followed that question, over and over, little by little, the way most good things arrive.

And every answer I picked up only handed me a harder question, which is the part nobody warns you about. You think you’re solving your life. You’re just wandering deeper into it.

It started innocently enough. Who am I, outside of work and motherhood? I didn’t love how long it took me to come up with anything, so I went looking. The looking led me outside, somewhere with dirt under its fingernails, where the next question was already waiting: what brings me joy, the kind that’s mine and not the kind I perform for an audience?

That one kept me outside for good, and the more time I spent with my hands in the soil, the more a harder one started to surface: after the better part of a decade spent talking, what would I hear if I finally stopped? It didn’t lead me forward. It pulled me back, out of all the noise, toward something I was only just learning to hear.

And it walked me straight into the question that rearranged the furniture in my chest, the one I’m still living my way into. Could I make work the least interesting thing about me?

Asking that out loud showed me something I’d spent years avoiding. The game I’d been so good at, the one about racking up numbers and proof that you’re doing okay, was only ever one game. There were a hundred others I’d never let myself play, too busy keeping score in the only one I knew how to win.

So I did the strangest thing for a woman who’d built her identity on being good at things, and on being fast at them. I slowed all the way down. I stepped back from the race I’d been running so long I’d mistaken it for who I was. I started being a beginner on purpose.

I walked straight toward a pile of things I’m going to be gloriously bad at for a while. I started baking sourdough, which is delicious now, for the record. There’s a garden out back and one in the front, and this summer a dahlia microfarm, rows of them I get to watch push up out of the ground on their own slow time.

We’ve got chickens, who are the dumbest and most delightful creatures I’ve ever met, plus a rotating cast of foster dogs underfoot. I joined a rowing team too, although, go figure, most mornings I choose my warm bed over the cold water, and I’ve decided that counts as its own kind of wisdom. And I took a seat on the board of our local soup kitchen and let myself be the brand-new person in the room who doesn’t know how any of it works yet.

And nobody mentions the best part about being a beginner again in your late thirties. It’s humbling and a little ridiculous and it makes you feel about nine years old, and it’s the most alive I’ve felt in a decade.

The bravest thing I’ve done in four years might also be the one nobody clapped for. I refused to move the goalpost, and let myself want less instead of more, which the game has no category for.

That’s why I walked away from the podcast, the biggest and loudest thing I ever built. I’d written a chapter about finding your enough point and saying the hard no, and then, wouldn’t you know it, I went and found mine, which might be the most on-brand thing I’ve ever done.

.I don’t totally know what to call the last four years. There’s a phrase for it that makes me want to roll my own eyes, so I’ll just tell you what it felt like instead. It felt like waking up to who I want to be and finally handing her the keys.

It meant closing chapters that other people loved, the ones where they’d fallen for a version of me I had already outgrown. There were burn-it-all-down seasons and what’s-even-the-point seasons. And running underneath it all along were the questions, the annoying ones that tug your sleeve at the worst possible moment and refuse to let you re-settle into a life you’ve grown out of, no matter how comfortable the couch.

The part I didn’t see coming is what all of this has done to how I show up out here. The more I pull back, the more I keep choosing not to fully vanish, and I’ve had to be straight with myself about why.

It’s because we so rarely get to watch this part. The climbing woman is everywhere, on an endless loop, always reaching for the next bigger thing. We’ve all watched a thousand versions of her, and the world acts like that’s the only story a woman’s life is allowed to tell.

We almost never get to watch a woman choose the quiet on purpose and turn out perfectly fine.

So if I show you any of it now, the dahlias and the slow mornings, that’s the only reason. I’m not performing a smaller life for anyone. I just want to leave the porch light on for Option B, so you know it’s there, so you know it’s allowed.

I think about her a lot lately, that woman in the leather chair, typing after bedtime with one little girl asleep down the hall and another one still tucked inside her belly, so sure she was finishing something. I want to tell her she was cracking open a door she couldn’t see the other side of, and that the not-knowing she was so afraid of would turn out to be the gift.

I want to tell her thank you. For sitting alone at that desk, night after night, pouring the truest things she knew onto the page, even the ones that scared her, and choosing the words that would tell over the words that would sell. What she did took a kind of courage she didn’t even know to call courage, taking everything tender and unfinished inside her and handing it to people she would never meet, with no promise a word of it would land. She had no idea who’d be holding it on the other end. She couldn’t have known it would be read so closely and loved so hard, or that one copy would find its way home to her, carrying the two people she loved most.

What I’m only now letting myself say out loud is that I’m standing at another trailhead. There’s a stretch of country I’ve barely started to walk, the land we’re tending, the woman I can feel myself still becoming, and I can’t see the other side of this door either. But this time it doesn’t scare me, because I know what’s waiting on the far side of a brave question.

There is more of your life waiting for you than you have any idea is coming.

I’m not telling you any of this from a finish line, by the way. I don’t have it figured out, and the surprise of my life is that I no longer want to. My favorite thought lately is that four years from now I’ll read this back, shake my head, and think, oh, if only she knew. I hope I’m always her, showing up with everything I’ve got and wide awake to how much I still can’t see, because not knowing what you don’t know yet turns out to be the adventure. I’m right in the middle of it alongside you, dirt under my nails, making it up as I go.

So take whatever part of this is useful and leave the rest right there on the table. You don’t have to overhaul anything or walk away from a single thing this week, and if you’re reading this in a season where the most honest answer you’ve got is just grief, or some version of I don’t know yet, that one counts every bit as much. You don’t have to be anywhere other than exactly where you are.

And you don’t need me to lead you through any of it, because you are the hero of this story, and you always have been. The bravest thing you can do is sit with yourself long enough to ask the question that matters most, and trust yourself to stay for whatever comes back.

So here we are, four years and a becoming later. That copy is still on the shelf, their handwriting still in the margins, and some mornings I open it just to see what they underlined, to read my own question back through their eyes. They knew how to ask it, they asked it of me my whole life.

How are you, really?

Sit still and tell yourself the truth. Your answer is already in you, the way it always has been, the way theirs is still tucked into the margins of a book I once thought was finished.

How are you, though. Really. I've been asking everyone lately.

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P.S. If you've never read How Are You, Really?, or you want to sit with it again four years on, it’s right here. I read the audiobook myself, so if you'd rather, you can just let me ask you the question in person.

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