There’s a specific kind of Tuesday I used to have without noticing it: eyes open, phone already in my hand before my feet were on the floor, thumb moving before my brain had.
Weather, email, whatever three people had said overnight. It wasn’t rest.
It was just the fastest possible exit from being alone with myself for four seconds.
Last week I woke up on a Tuesday like that and reached for the phone out of pure muscle memory – and then, for reasons I can’t fully explain, set it back down on the nightstand and just lay there instead.
Not meditating. Not doing anything productive with the quiet.
Just letting the ceiling be the ceiling for a minute before the day started asking things of me.
I want to be honest about how small this sounds written down, because it is small.
I’m not going to tell you it fixed anything or that I floated out of bed transformed.
What I noticed, standing at the kitchen counter a few minutes later waiting on the coffee, was that I felt like I was starting my day instead of starting my scrolling. That’s the whole difference.
It’s not dramatic. It’s just mine.
I’ve written before about the year my marriage ended and the unglamorous work that came with it – the walks, the journal, the audio I was skeptical of and tried anyway. What I haven’t said as clearly is that none of that work ever really finishes into some permanent, solved state.
It just becomes a smaller, quieter set of choices you keep making, over and over, on ordinary Tuesdays nobody’s going to write a movie about.
The version of me who used to reach for her phone first thing wasn’t a bad person.
She was scared of the quiet, and her phone was the fastest way out of it.
I understand her completely. I just don’t need to be her most mornings anymore – though I’ll say plainly, I still backslide on the hard weeks. This isn’t a before-and-after story. It’s more like weather.
What’s changed isn’t that the quiet stopped being uncomfortable. It’s that I stopped treating that discomfort like an emergency that needed to be solved in four seconds flat.
Some mornings the ceiling is just the ceiling, and I’m allowed to lie there and look at it before I have to be useful to anyone, including myself.
I don’t have a big lesson to wrap this up with. Just a small, ordinary Tuesday, and the fact that I noticed it at all – which, a couple of years ago, I don’t think I would have.
If you want the fuller version of what this year has looked like – the parts I’m still sitting with, the ones I haven’t figured out how to write about yet – that’s what the newsletter is for. I keep the more unfinished thoughts there.
With Love, Wren
The Flowers I Used to Wait for Someone Else to Buy — The nine-dollar bucket of flowers I walked past for years, and what it meant to finally buy them for myself.
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