“The most subversive thing a woman can do is talk honestly about her life.”
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
I grew up believing ordinary was something to escape — a temporary condition for people who hadn’t tried hard enough yet. Exceptional was the goal. Exceptional justified the effort.
Somewhere in my thirties I started noticing how exhausting that story was. Always performing, always becoming, always one achievement away from feeling like enough.
The most honest thing I can say now is that my life is pretty ordinary — and that it contains, in that ordinariness, more warmth than I ever found chasing something bigger.
Being nobody special, it turns out, leaves a lot of room for actually being happy. That’s not settling. That’s arriving.