When the White Picket Fence is No Longer Enough

In June 2017, standing at five feet five and weighing less than ninety-eight pounds, weary from life, I boarded a plane to Hawaii by myself. My divorce had been finalized only a few short weeks before. My family and friends (the friends I still talked to post-divorce) all shared a disapproving tone in their voice when I told them of my plans. I had not yet secured a full-time job and had just scraped by a tough winter of plow bills and navigating life in a home alone. And yet the call to go was deafening to me. I spent two days traveling—each way—in order to spend two days at the Hay House Writer’s Conference being held in Ka'anapali. I had never been away from the kids for that long, and even I was questioning what the hell I was doing traveling across the country to go to a writer’s conference—when I wasn’t even a writer. What I didn’t realize at the time is that what I was doing was planting seeds. I had followed an urge that made no sense given my current circumstances, that contradicted the views of those I loved most, and that confused even me. A constant loop of “you have no business taking this trip” ran through my thoughts. Still, I planted seeds. I took the first baby step of both believing in myself and the dreams I’d had as a little girl and dared to follow something other than the expected yellow brick road of tradition I was supposed to adhere to. On June 24, 2017, the first night of the conference, we all sat in a room together surrounded by other beautiful souls looking for knowledge from the many inspiring authors presenting. Our first task was to respond to a simple prompt: “I couldn’t have known…” To which I responded, in my notebook, “I couldn’t have known the magnitude of how one single decision would change the trajectory of my life. Some moments come into our existence and we can’t plan or control our way out of them. Our only option is to embrace that which we do not know. Only to allow it to lead to where we truly belong.” On that first evening, I realized I wasn’t alone in my unnerving and confusing quest of believing that maybe, just maybe, there was another aspect of life and purpose that I had been missing up until this point. Some may ask, “Why write this? Why now? Why the details of life that most people keep tucked away in the privacy of their own thoughts and homes and experiences?” I have shed a thousand versions of the woman I once was, from that trip to Hawaii until now. And probably a million more than the woman I set out to be when embarking into adulthood. In a text message, a friend wrote, “Eight-year-old Sarah would be proud of the woman you have become.” I am not quite sure that is true, as I have made some massive mistakes and caused hurt to others in ways I can’t ever take back, but I do think I have become closer to the woman I longed to be as a little girl. I have cried for friends who have gone to Heaven far too soon, have had my own brush with a close encounter before I was ready, have cried on my knees with the challenges my son faces, and have ached watching my little girl grow up far too fast far too soon. I have watched people I love and desperately wanted to cling to walk away. I have changed jobs and life to hold on to what we had and to make room for the life that somewhere deep inside I knew I could build once the pieces that had become too heavy began to fall away. Seven years later, here I am, witnessing the blossoming of seeds I hadn’t even realized I was sowing. At night when my children are sleeping and I go in for a final kiss, I often whisper, “I’m going to make this better for you,” or, “I am going to be better for you.” What I’ve come to realize since the day that fragile woman, fragile in every aspect of her existence, boarded the plane was that making it better was being the most authentic version of myself I could be. There is only one shot at this life, and so often we run around hiding our truest versions of ourselves. Scared of what people will think, scared of what our families, our friends, our bosses, our communities will think, if we dare to step outside the perception they’ve had us cemented in. If we dare to let out all that we have been holding in. I thought motherhood/home/family/marriage was the answer to everything I had been searching for, the complete solution to every insecurity and instability I felt. Until I realized that those too were all masks, roles, responsibilities—treasured ones for sure—but they weren’t allowing me to release everything I felt bottled up inside. Ultimately it took the complete shattering of those roles for me to slowly begin to find myself in the charred rubble left behind by the life I’d set fire to.