The Morning I Realized I Was Waiting for My Life to Start

I had lived in Arizona for over sixty years.

When people ask where I'm from, the answer has always come easily. Arizona. The desert heat gave way to a sunset that used color as a language only my soul could translate. That was home in the way that settles into your body and stays ... the kind of home you carry even when you leave.

And I left.

Washington first, for three years - LOVED it. Then Montana, six months ago. Both of them are staggeringly beautiful in ways that still catch me off guard. Washington has more shades of green than I ever knew existed after a lifetime of desert. Montana with its mountains that stand calm and steady against a sky of bluer-than-blue puffy clouds, and the Missouri River unrolling like a long silver ribbon…a place of enormous, ancient quiet that you can actually feel.

I chose all of it. Nobody pushed me out the door.

But here's what I didn't understand about choosing something big: choosing it and being ready for it are two entirely different things. And the gap between them is where I almost lost myself.

I work from home. I write. I have a partner I love and a life that looks, from the outside, pretty full.

And I love solitude. Not in the tired way people sometimes say it ... not as a polite way of saying they're done with people. I mean it genuinely. Silence feels like company to me. A morning alone can feel like a gift. That has been true my whole life and I've never apologized for it.

So I told myself I was fine.

What I didn't see ... or maybe couldn't let myself see ... was that solitude had quietly become something else. The line between choosing to be alone and hiding from the discomfort of building something new is thinner than I'd like to admit. And I had crossed it without noticing.

I also started to disappear in another way.

My partner and I are different people. That's not a criticism ... it's just true, and it's part of what works between us. But when you're new somewhere, when you don't have your own people yet, your own rhythms, your own corners of the world that belong specifically to you ... it's easy to start filling the shape of someone else's life instead of building yours.

That's what I did. Gradually, quietly, in the way that never feels like a decision because it never is one. Just a series of small surrenders that add up to something you didn't choose.

I'm a woman who knows herself. I've done the work ... years of it. The  Enneagram, therapy, self-inquiry, and hard conversations I asked myself that most people avoid. I know who I am.

And I still almost disappeared.

That's the part that got my attention.

Because if it can happen to me ... someone who lives and breathes self-awareness, who has built a community around exactly this kind of honest reckoning ... it can happen to anyone. It's probably happening to someone reading this right now.

Loneliness at this age is a particular animal. It doesn't look the way it did at thirty. It doesn't show up and loudly announce itself. It shows up as a world that keeps getting a little smaller. Fewer risks taken. Fewer new people pursued. Fewer mornings where you do something that scares you just enough to remind you that you're alive.

And then one day, the smallness feels normal.

That's the moment that scared me. Not the loneliness itself ... I could work with that. It was the moment I realized I had started to accept it. That I had unconsciously decided this was just what life looked like now.

Hell no.

I pushed myself out the door. Not gracefully ... I want to be clear about that. Not with some surge of spiritual clarity or a beautiful moment of breakthrough. More like the way you get into cold water. You know you have to. You hate that you have to. And you go anyway because staying on the edge isn't actually living.

Making real friends at this age is harder than anyone prepares you for. Not acquaintances. Not friendly neighbors or pleasant people you see at the same coffee shop. I’m not talking about acquaintances, friendly neighbors when you walk your dog, or people who smile at the coffee shop. 

I’m talking…actual friends ... the kind who know you now, not who you used to be. 

That kind of connection takes time, repetition, and a willingness to be uncomfortable and keep showing up anyway.

I'm still in the middle of building it.

But I'm in it. That's the difference.

Here's what I want to say to you ... the woman who maybe recognizes something in this, who has her own version of waiting, her own quiet shrinking she's been calling something more acceptable:

Your life doesn't start when things feel more comfortable. It doesn't start when you feel ready, when you've grieved enough, when you've healed enough, when the timing is finally right.

It's already started. It started without asking your permission.

The Wildly Inspired by Life's Divine Dance (the meaning behind WILDD Hearts) is not a passive thing. The dance is already playing. The question is whether you're standing at the edge of the room watching, or whether you're in it.

I'm choosing in.

Even on the days it's hard. Even in Montana winters, I didn't entirely plan for even when I miss Arizona in the bone-deep way that surprises me sometimes.

I'm choosing in.

Love is ALL there is. Diana