Coming Home Meant Leaving Who I Had to Be

I am not going to tell you it was easy. I am not going to tell you the decision felt clean at the time or that I was confident in the weeks that followed or that the freedom did not frighten me in ways I have not fully finished describing.

What I will tell you is this: I am standing under the mango tree barefoot, watching my nephew, and nothing is required of me in this moment except to be here. And I am here. Fully. Without performance or credential or apology.

That is new. After forty-three years, it is genuinely new.

The book you have been reading is a book about the room. Every chapter was one wall, one window, one piece of furniture you moved into place by simply recognizing it. Recognition is the first room. You have been in it for fifty-two chapters. What you do with the recognition is the rest of the architecture.

The walk back is not dramatic. It does not require a single large gesture. It requires fifty-two small ones, one per week if you want to be literal about it, each one an act of choosing the actual life over the performed one. Some weeks the choice is obvious. Some weeks you will not be sure you are choosing correctly. That uncertainty is not evidence of failure. It is evidence of a life being lived by a person who is actually in it.

Take the first step. Whatever it is for you. The small true step, not the impressive one. The room is built one step at a time.

I will be here if you need to find your way back.

— Job