STEFFSPEAKS

When I was younger, I thought 37 would look very different.

If you know me, you know I love a good plan. I thrive when there is routine. I really thought I would have everything neatly arranged by now. A straight path career-wise. A long, healthy marriage. And a life that felt calm, predictable, and mildly aesthetic in a way I could have described in one Instagram caption.

Instead, I am divorced, starting over in more ways than I ever planned for, and learning that adulthood is children, work, therapy to process people who will not go to therapy, emails, more emails, texts you forgot to answer three days ago, phone calls about charges that make no sense, and then more therapy. All while trying to drink enough water, eat enough food, sleep enough hours, show up prepared for life, and appear vaguely put together.

If I had stayed fully locked into my career path without stepping away for family life, I would likely be further ahead professionally than I am now. I didn’t fully realize what that meant at the time. Now that I am on my own, that realization has become heavy, especially watching the state of education continue to decline and seeing how easily teachers are treated as replaceable, particularly those who are newer to the field.

There was a long stretch where I clung tightly to my imagined life. I made it bigger and softer in my mind than it ever actually was. Letting it go felt less like a decision and more like losing something I had already built an entire identity around.

Some of those years were extremely hard in ways I can’t even describe.

There were many days I would run to the bathroom between class periods, cry, and then walk back into a classroom full of teenagers as if nothing had happened. I was teaching literary analysis while privately trying to make sense of my own life choices. I would sit in random parking lots to avoid facing what my home life was at the time. I went to the gym for hours. I slept. A lot.

And despite that experience, I find myself settling into contentment and really appreciating it.

I just had to grieve first.

My life is not what I pictured, but it is mine in a way I did not expect. I own my home. I make decisions without negotiating them against someone else’s expectations. I am not living inside a script I outgrew years ago.

There is space in my life now that did not exist before. Space to think. Space to heal. Space to write again. Space to notice the parts of myself that got pushed aside for a long time without needing to justify why they matter.

So no, this is not the version of life I once imagined.

But I think many of us end up here eventually, in lives we did not predict, trying to make peace with the distance between expectation and reality. And somewhere in that space, we learn how to belong to ourselves again.

-SS