Greetings my lovely feral, dark, and bright ones,

There are things grief takes from you that everyone expects: a person, a voice you can no longer hear on the other end of the phone, a familiar presence that suddenly becomes memory. Then there are the things grief uncovers, and those are much harder to explain.

Mom’s death left me more broken than I ever expected it would. Our relationship was complicated, and I think that is exactly why the grief became so complicated too. I was not only mourning the woman who died. I was mourning the mother I wished I had known growing up, the relationship I kept hoping we might somehow have as adults, and all those moments that never became what some part of me wanted them to be.

That kind of grief does not fit neatly into one emotion. You can love someone, miss them, be angry with them, resent them, feel relief, and then feel guilty for that relief, all at the same time. There should probably be a warning label for it: Grief may contain contradictory emotions. Do not attempt to organize them into matching storage containers.

The last nineteen months of Mom’s life changed something in me. By the time she died, I had traveled through an emotional landscape I never expected to see, and when everything finally became quiet, I was left standing in a life that felt different.

Part of what died with her was a version of me I had been carrying for most of my life.

Rachel.

Except Rachel was never just one person. She was a collection of versions, each shaped for a different room, a different relationship, and a different expectation. There was Rachel the daughter, the sister, the cousin, the wife, the employee, the peacekeeper. She knew how to soften certain opinions, swallow certain words, adjust her edges, overlook things, make excuses, and read a room before deciding how much of herself was safe to bring into it.

Of course everybody has different sides. We all have a professional version, a casual version, and the version who answers the door for an unexpected delivery looking like a woodland creature that has recently survived a natural disaster. That is normal.

What I am talking about is something deeper: reshaping yourself so consistently around other people’s expectations that eventually you are not entirely sure which parts were ever yours.

My grandparents were different. They were the people who never made me feel as though I needed to become somebody else in order to be loved. With them, I could simply be, and that kind of acceptance is easy to underestimate until you spend years without it.

After Mom died, I realized I did not need all those versions of Rachel anymore. You would think that realization would feel completely freeing. Sometimes it did. Other times it felt like somebody handed me the keys to an empty room and said, “Okay. This is yours now. Decorate.”

With what?

Apparently I had arrived carrying fifty-five years’ worth of boxes, and somewhere along the way the labels had gotten seriously fucked up.

There were boxes filled with things other people expected of me. Things I learned to say and things I learned not to say. Opinions I softened because the full-strength version might make somebody uncomfortable. Things I was told I should like, ways I was supposed to behave, beliefs I was expected to carry, and ideas about what kind of woman I was supposed to become.

There were boxes labeled DAUGHTER, SISTER, COUSIN, WIFE, WOMAN, LADY, FAMILY, GOOD GIRL, KEEP THE PEACE, BE THE BIGGER PERSON. There were boxes filled with guilt. Boxes filled with obligation. Boxes I had been carrying for so long that I had forgotten nobody ever actually asked me whether I wanted what was inside.

And mixed in with all of that was me.

The real stuff.

Rae.

So now I am unpacking, one box at a time, and I keep asking myself: Is this mine? Do I actually believe this? Do I actually want this? Do I actually like this? Would I choose this if nobody else had an opinion?

That last question has become a big one, because becoming myself is not only about finding my voice or refusing to take shit anymore. It is about everything: what I believe, what I love, what I wear, how I do my hair, whether I wear makeup, what I eat, how I decorate my home, what music I listen to, what I do with my hands, what I want to learn, where I want to live, and who I want sitting at my table.

It is about discovering what makes me feel completely, unmistakably like me.

Some boxes are surprisingly easy to unpack.

Witch.

Keep.

That word belongs to me, and I am no longer interested in shrinking it into something more socially comfortable. I am deeply spiritual, but my spirituality does not fit neatly inside somebody else’s religion or rulebook. I am drawn to old gods and goddesses, mythology, ancestry, genealogy, history, ritual, nature, symbols, smoke, herbs, intuition, and that strange thread that seems to connect people across generations.

I am fascinated by where we come from. Give me old records, forgotten names, migrations, family mysteries, old cemeteries, stories passed down through generations, and all the lives that had to unfold exactly as they did for any of us to exist. I like old things because they carry weight. I like stories with shadows in them. I like women in mythology who are complicated instead of sweet. I like magic that feels ancient and truth that has some teeth.

All of that gets unpacked.

So does my empathy, even when I sometimes wish the damn thing came with a volume control.

My politics stay too. I am a Traditionalist and a Right-Leaning Populist Independent. I do not fit comfortably into anybody’s tidy little political box, and apparently after spending fifty-five years unpacking boxes, the last thing I need is somebody trying to shove me into another one.

I think for myself. Some people will agree with me. Some will not. That is life.

I missed orientation.

Moving on.

Some of the most interesting things I am unpacking are much more ordinary.

I was raised with a certain idea of what it meant to be a lady. There were rules attached to that word, spoken and unspoken. How a woman should dress. How she should look. How she should behave. What was feminine. What was proper. How much effort she should put into making herself presentable.

Well, here is the thing.

I am absolutely a woman. I have never been confused about that. I am also a tomboy at heart and a die-hard country girl.

Those things are not opposites.

Give me jeans. Give me boots. Give me comfortable clothes I can actually live in. Give me animals, dirt, trees, open land, old barns, rivers, country roads, and somewhere I can breathe without worrying whether I look sufficiently ladylike while doing it.

I will wear makeup when I want to wear makeup and skip it when I do not. I will do my hair because I feel like doing my hair, not because somebody decided a woman is somehow unfinished until she has styled herself for public consumption. I can dress up, put on makeup, fix my hair, and feel feminine as hell. I can also throw on jeans, pull my hair back, get dirt under my nails, and look like I have been arguing with livestock since sunrise.

Still Rae.

Still a woman.

Still mine.

Femininity is not a uniform. Being a woman is not a performance. I do not owe anybody a particular version of it.

And apparently Rae does not fit neatly into occupational boxes either.

I work in tech support. I troubleshoot problems, deal with systems, figure out what is broken, and keep going until I understand what needs to be fixed. Then I can walk into a kitchen and cook. I can bake. I can grill.

I will dig in the dirt, grow things, get filthy, work with my hands, and build something out of wood. Then I can come inside, pick up a book, disappear into a story, work on diamond art, do crafts, or spend hours creating something simply because making things makes me happy.

I do not have to choose between technical and creative, capable and feminine, tomboy and woman, getting dirty and making something beautiful, cooking dinner and building something, troubleshooting technology and disappearing into a book.

I am all of those things.

That is the problem with the boxes people like to put women into. Pick one. Be this kind of woman. Not that kind. Too rough. Too soft. Too feminine. Not feminine enough. Too opinionated. Too domestic. Too independent. Too much.

Fuck that.

I can troubleshoot technology and bake something from scratch. I can build something out of wood and then spend hours doing crafts. I can grill dinner and still love a home that smells like cinnamon and frankincense. I can get dirt under my fingernails and still enjoy makeup when I feel like wearing it.

I can be a tomboy, a country girl, a wife, a witch, a tech support professional, a cook, a maker, a reader, an animal lover, and whatever else I discover along the way.

All of it is Rae.

The same goes for food. I am tired of everything becoming another set of instructions about what women are supposed to do.

Eat this. Do not eat that. A woman your age should eat this way. A woman your size should never eat that. Count this. Measure that. Feel guilty about this. Earn that.

Enough.

I want to eat in a way that nourishes me, satisfies me, makes me feel good, and fits the life I actually live. My body is not another room where everybody else gets to stand around giving decorating instructions.

My clothes are mine. My hair is mine. My face is mine. My body is mine. My food is mine. My version of womanhood is mine.

And once I started unpacking those boxes, I began noticing some others that did not need unpacking at all.

Those fuckers need to go straight to the trash:

• Keeping the peace at my own expense.
• Being the bigger person while everybody else gets to behave however the hell they want.
• Being nice just to be nice.
• Making myself smaller so somebody else can stay comfortable.
• Swallowing what I want to say because somebody might not like it.
• Carrying relationships simply because I feel obligated to carry them.
• Being whatever daughter, sister, cousin, friend, wife, or woman somebody else decided I was supposed to be.

Trash.

Every last one.

For most of my life, I thought being a good person meant taking the higher road. Keep the peace. Let it go. Give another chance. Try to understand. Consider what they might be going through. Do not make things worse. Do not say exactly what you think because somebody might get upset.

Meanwhile, I was the one absorbing it. I was the one backing down. I was the one swallowing words. I was the one expected to understand everybody else. I was the one tearing pieces off myself so everybody else could enjoy the peace.

There is nothing wrong with kindness.

There is something very wrong with using kindness to slowly tear yourself apart.

I am not doing that anymore.

I am no longer backing down simply because standing my ground makes somebody uncomfortable. I am no longer being nice just for the sake of being nice. I am not going to soften every truth, overlook every insult, excuse every behavior, or endlessly take the higher road while somebody else gets to stomp around on the road below throwing rocks at me.

Sometimes keeping the peace is wisdom.

Sometimes keeping the peace is just another name for abandoning yourself so everybody else can remain comfortable.

Rachel was very good at keeping that kind of peace.

Rae is taking that box to the curb.

And while I am out there, there is one particularly heavy box that has been sitting around for a very long time.

FAMILY.

As long as Mom was alive, I felt like I had to keep up with family. I had roles: daughter, sister, cousin, whatever version of me somebody needed me to be.

There was an invisible expectation attached to those titles. Keep in touch. Make the effort. Overlook things. Understand. Forgive. Maintain the relationship. Keep the peace.

Because they are family.

That phrase has excused a remarkable amount of bullshit over the years.

They are family.

Okay.

And?

After Mom died, something shifted. I no longer felt that same invisible structure holding me in those assigned positions, and I started asking a question Rachel rarely allowed herself to ask:

Do I actually want this relationship?

Not what am I supposed to do? Not what will everybody think? Not but we are family.

Do I want this person in my life?

That question changes everything.

Sharing blood does not automatically create closeness. A family title does not automatically create love, trust, respect, reciprocity, or compatibility.

“Cousin” is a relationship on a family tree. It is not a lifetime access pass. “Sister” does not mean I have to become whatever version of a sister somebody expects me to be. And being a daughter should never have required me to spend my life becoming whatever everybody else needed Rachel to be.

I spent enough years believing that being a good daughter, sister, cousin, or whatever else meant adjusting myself to keep the family machinery running.

Well.

Fuck that.

I am done performing relationships simply because somebody handed me a role and told me it was mine.

If we genuinely love each other, respect each other, make an effort for each other, and add something meaningful to each other’s lives, then there is something worth keeping.

Unpack that.

Make room for it.

But obligation without relationship? Trash.

Guilt disguised as loyalty? Trash.

Keeping somebody in my life solely because we happen to occupy neighboring branches on a genealogy chart?

Straight to the fucking curb.

Ironically, for someone who loves genealogy as much as I do, I have learned something important: a family tree can tell me where I came from.

It does not get to tell me who I have to take with me.

And sitting right beside that family box is another one I never asked for.

ROLE MODEL.

Oh, hell no.

I am not anyone’s role model. I do not want to be anyone’s role model. I never wanted to be.

Do not put me on a pedestal and tell me I was the wind beneath your wings. Your life is yours. Your choices are yours. Your successes are yours. Your mistakes are yours. Your consequences are yours. Whatever you built, broke, survived, screwed up, repaired, celebrated, or regretted belongs to you.

Do not hand it to me.

I will not take responsibility for the choices another adult makes, good or bad, and I do not want credit for somebody becoming who they are either.

Those are your wings.

Flap them yourself.

I have my own shit to do.

And do not look at my life and try to become me.

Look in the mirror.

If you want a role model, find one there.

Ask yourself what you believe when nobody is waiting for the correct answer. What do you love when nobody is telling you what you should love? What makes you feel alive? What fascinates you? What makes you weird? What makes you laugh? What makes you angry? Who are you when nobody else is standing in the room telling you who you should be?

Figure that person out.

I spent too many years looking outside myself for clues about who I was supposed to be. I am certainly not going to turn around now and become somebody else’s instruction manual.

I am not becoming Rae so somebody else can become Rae.

There is already one of me.

Trust me.

That is plenty.

Do not become me.

Become you.

Which brings me to another box I have been opening.

FRIENDSHIP.

I want friends. That is different from saying I am lonely.

I am not lonely.

I have Ronnie. I have our animals. I enjoy my own company, my interests, my home, and the life we have built together. My life is not empty because I do not have a circle of friends sitting around me.

Would I like real friendship?

Absolutely.

I want people who make an effort to be in my life because they genuinely enjoy being there. People who call because they want to talk, not because they need something. People who say, “Come over.” People I can text something completely ridiculous to at 7:13 in the morning without wondering whether I am bothering them.

People who can sit on the patio for hours drinking coffee while dogs wander around and nobody cares that the conversation has somehow gone from politics to ghosts to shampoo to whether Winston understands rain.

Those people.

I want depth and reciprocity. What I do not want are relationships where I am always maintaining the connection while somebody else occasionally remembers I exist.

There was a time when I accepted more of that than I should have. I made excuses for people. I kept connections alive long after I should have stopped doing all the work.

I do not do that anymore.

That does not make me lonely.

It means wanting people in my life does not require me to accept just anyone who happens to occupy the space.

I would rather leave a chair empty than fill it with somebody who makes me feel alone while sitting right beside me.

Someday, I would love for Ronnie and me to have those people. People who walk into our home, sit down, stay for dinner, and know they do not have to perform for us because we are not performing for them either.

People who know us.

People who make an effort.

People whose weird works with our weird.

And preferably people who are not horrified by the possibility of encountering a ferret.

I still have standards.

Then there is Ronnie.

When I step back and look at the life the two of us have built, I sometimes have to remind myself how much that means.

We moved to Tucson in 2007 with six bags of luggage and very little else. No roots. No people waiting for us. No jobs already secured. No car. No established life.

Just the two of us trying to figure out what came next.

Today we have good jobs where we are valued, health insurance, steady income, savings, a car, a good landlord, a home full of animals, and nearly two decades of shared history behind us.

That did not happen by accident.

We built it together.

Do Ronnie and I fight? FUCK YEAH.

Do we argue? Absolutely.

Do we occasionally stop talking for a while because continuing the conversation at that exact moment would probably lead to one of us saying something spectacularly unhelpful?

Yes.

That is called wisdom.

Or self-preservation.

Possibly both.

We are not one of those couples who float through life holding hands while inspirational violin music plays behind us. We are real people. We irritate each other, misunderstand each other, need space sometimes, and then we come back.

That part matters.

We do not give up on each other.

Love does not require me to become whatever version of a wife somebody else thinks I should be. It means being fully myself beside someone who is fully himself and continuing to choose each other through all the messy shit that comes with being human.

Sometimes love looks like romance.

Sometimes it looks like, “I am extremely annoyed with you right now, but did you eat?”

Still counts.

Still love.

Still ours.

There is another box sitting in the room that I have not figured out yet.

HOME.

Part of me desperately misses green.

Not Tucson green.

Real, abundant, almost excessive green.

Trees everywhere. Grass. Rivers. Lakes. Ponds. Earth under bare feet.

I think about Georgia and North Carolina because I miss landscapes that feel lush and alive without requiring constant negotiation with the sun. Meanwhile, Ronnie is more inclined to say, “Let’s move up by Flagstaff or the White Mountains or down to Tombstone.”

And I am mentally standing beside a river under a canopy of trees.

We are working on it.

The fantasy of moving is very different from the reality. We have eight fur babies, and you do not casually relocate eight animals across the country. Then there are our jobs, savings, health insurance, landlord, and the stability we have spent nearly twenty years building.

You cannot ignore those things simply because another state has prettier trees.

Well.

Technically you can.

But that seems unwise.

So that box stays open.

I can want something different and still be deeply grateful for what I have.

Those truths do not cancel each other out.

I can long for forests while appreciating the bottle tree in our backyard. I can dream about rivers while loving monsoon rain over the Rincon Mountains. I can want a house Ronnie and I own together someday while recognizing that the rental we live in now has been home for years.

I can imagine leaving Tucson without pretending our life here was somehow a mistake.

Maybe HOME is one of those boxes I am not supposed to finish unpacking yet.

Maybe I do not know where everything goes.

And perhaps for the first time in my life, I am learning to let “I don’t know” be a complete answer.

There are still boxes everywhere.

Some I have opened and immediately recognized as mine. Some contain things I had forgotten were there because they spent so many years buried underneath what everybody else thought I should be. Some have surprised the hell out of me. Some contain things I am still sitting on the floor turning over in my hands, trying to decide whether they belong to Rae or whether Rachel carried them because she thought she had to.

And some?

Already at the curb.

Good fucking riddance.

I am fifty-five years old, and I am finally understanding that becoming myself does not mean inventing some brand-new woman.

Rae was always here.

She was underneath the expectations, the people-pleasing, the assigned family roles, the pressure to keep the peace, the rules about what I should like, how I should dress, what I should believe, how a lady should behave, and all those different versions of Rachel created for different rooms and different people.

She was the country girl.

The tomboy.

The witch.

The wife.

The tech support woman who can troubleshoot a problem and then go bake something.

The woman who can get dirt under her fingernails, build something out of wood, grill dinner, read a book, do crafts, love animals, obsess over genealogy, argue politics, talk about ghosts, get sentimental over a tree, swear like a sailor, wear makeup when she damn well feels like it, and drink something she insists on calling magic bean potion.

She was all there.

I just had to stop asking everybody else which pieces I was allowed to keep.

Becoming Rae is opening fifty-five years’ worth of boxes and finally deciding for myself what stays.

Some things stay without question: my spirituality, my witchy shit, my curiosity, my politics, my country-girl heart, my jeans and boots, my love of cooking, baking, grilling, building, gardening, reading, crafting, technology, history, genealogy, animals, strange humor, softness, anger, opinions, and magic bean potion.

My love for Ronnie stays.

My desire for genuine friendship stays.

My dreams of green places, rivers, and a home that feels deeply ours stay.

My right to change my mind stays.

My right to say no stays.

My right to speak stays.

My right to decide who has access to me stays.

My right to love whatever the hell I love stays.

My right to take up space stays.

And the rest?

• Guilt for disappointing people.
• Obligation disguised as love.
• Relationships kept alive only because of shared DNA.
• Being whatever daughter, sister, cousin, friend, wife, lady, or woman somebody else decided I should be.
• Being somebody’s role model.
• Making myself smaller.
• Taking the higher road every single time while tearing myself apart so everybody else can stay comfortable.

Trash.

Straight to the fucking curb.

I do not know exactly who Rae will be five years from now, and honestly, I hope I do not.

Because I am not finished discovering her.

Hell, some mornings I barely know who Rae is before coffee.

But I finally understand that I do not need to have every box unpacked tonight.

This is my place now.

My life.

My being.

My wonderfully complicated fifty-five-year-old meat suit.

I get to decide what belongs here. I get to rearrange things, change my mind, discover something new about myself and make room for it. I get to decide that something I carried for thirty or forty or fifty years no longer fits and throw it away.

I get to love things simply because I love them.

I get to eat what works for me, dress how I want, wear my hair how I want, put makeup on or leave my face completely alone. I get to get dirty, make things, fix things, cook things, read things, believe things, question things, and change things.

I get to choose the people who sit at my table.

I get to leave some chairs empty.

I get to be kind without being a doormat.

I get to be compassionate without becoming responsible for everybody else.

I get to have opinions without apologizing for having them.

I get to be soft and fierce, technical and creative, feminine and tomboyish, spiritual and political, sentimental and sarcastic, complicated and contradictory.

I get to be me.

And I do not need anyone standing in the doorway telling me how they think I should decorate.

Rachel does not live here anymore.

Rae does.

There are still boxes scattered all over the floor, and there probably will be for a while.

That is okay.

For the first time in my life, I am not unpacking them according to somebody else’s instructions.

I am opening each one and asking:

Is this mine?

If it is, I will find a place for it.

If I am not sure, I can leave the box open until I figure it out.

And if the only reason I have been carrying something is guilt, obligation, expectation, fear, appearances, tradition-for-tradition’s-sake, or somebody else’s idea of who I am supposed to be?

I know exactly where that box goes.

To the curb.

I am not becoming the woman anybody else thinks I should be, and I am not asking anyone to become me either.

Do not use my life as your blueprint.

Look in your own mirror.

Open your own boxes.

Figure out what belongs to you.

Keep what is truly yours.

Throw out what never was.

I have enough work to do over here.

I am becoming Rae.

Not a better Rachel.

Not another version of Rachel built for a different room.

Rae.

Finally.

Unapologetically.

Unadulterated.

And entirely on my own fucking terms.

This flows much better now. The short lines are mostly reserved for actual impact, while the reflective sections read like a real personal essay instead of a stack of captions. The two bullet sections also give the eye a break exactly where the “sorting boxes” metaphor benefits from becoming visually literal.