There’s a strange grief that comes with getting everything you thought you wanted.
The home. The freedom. The time.
And then, the silence.
I used to live on adrenaline. Long hours. Constant motion. A calendar packed with meetings, flights, activities. There was always someone to respond to, something to fix, somewhere to be.
It kept the noise going—and it kept me from myself.
Then everything changed.
I stepped away from work to care for my mom.
She passed.
And suddenly, everything felt untethered.
And when your parents are gone, something shifts.
You become more conscious of time—of how quickly it’s passing.
We had already packed up our SF home to move to NYC.
A day late and a dollar short.
We flew back to SF after the burial—only to turn around and drive cross-country to New York with our aging cat, Beau. Always chatty, like he had something to say about everything. I miss him at times.
I still had my mother’s apartment to pack up.
Box by box. I did that alone.
We were in flux. Between coasts. Between lives.
We had rented an apartment in Dumbo. I’m not sure why that sounded logical at the time. It was far from my mother’s place and even a distance from the Brooklyn I knew growing up.
The apartment felt dark, noisy, empty.
Why was I back now?
She was gone.
And the weight of that—the finality, the disorientation—hit me hard.
I buried her, we got on a plane, then drove back east.
And landed in a place that felt as far from home as I could be.
I didn’t feel grounded.
I felt displaced.
Grief. Disorientation.
Memories I hadn’t processed.
Old coping habits I had justified with busyness.
I was so used to being productive that rest felt like guilt.
Stillness felt like failure.
Without the constant hum of activity, I felt… unrooted.
And when the noise stopped, I realized how hard it was to be alone with myself.
I had always found ways to stay busy.
No structure. No rhythm to orient my day.
I tackled packing her apartment in chunks. Some days I couldn’t be there long. Other days, I’d linger—looking through photos from a past life. It took months to finish.
Then we moved into a high-rise near the Brooklyn Heights park.
It was quiet, filled with sunlight, and felt like a world away from everything I had just been through.
Maybe it made sense at the time—our furniture was there, and we needed a next step.
I’d see the Statue of Liberty and think of my mom arriving in her twenties.
I wish I had known the woman she was then.
Later, we returned to Healdsburg.
A brighter, more open unit unexpectedly became available in our complex—something that rarely happens.
It wasn’t planned, but it felt like the right shift.
We still have our place in Brooklyn, but California has always felt more like home.
There have been a lot of moving parts.
California has always felt more like home.
I’m not sure I see the point of NYC anymore.
I started staying up late—really late—writing.
Not because I had to, but because it felt like the only place my voice returned.
I could finally hear myself think.
But morning would come, and I’d feel groggy.
Disoriented. Detached.
My body begged for rhythm.
But my mind was still spinning in that nocturnal place of memory, creation, reflection, and grief.
Who am I?
How did I get here?
I need roots.
I’ve spent a lifetime packing, moving, starting over again and again.
I feel worn and unsettled.
Maybe all the changes were an attempt to outrun the pain.
A way I looked outside myself when I really needed to root back into myself.
The writing has helped.
So has naming it.
This is what unrooted feels like:
– Drifting through the days without rhythm and routine
– Mourning friendships that were once vibrant and have quietly shifted
– Wanting to reach out to old friends—but feeling too fractured
– Feeling physically out of sync—exhausted, foggy, drained, a body asking for new rhythms
– Wondering who you are without the old roles, titles, or urgency
– Realizing the quiet reveals what the noise once hid
And there are days when even naming this feels like too much.
But in the stillness, something softer stirs.
Maybe this isn’t a breakdown, but a return.
Not a detour, but a recalibration.
Not a void, but an invitation to re-root.
In yourself.
In your body.
In your values.
In your life—not as it was, but as it is now.
That re-rooting doesn’t happen all at once.
It happens in moments. In small gestures of care. In slow, quiet ways
And that takes courage.
So if you feel unmoored, if you’re circling without an anchor—start here:
– Wake up gently and go outside for 10 minutes
– Eat something nourishing
– Set one intention for the day
– Move your body for even 20 minutes
– Write what you’re feeling, even if it’s messy
You’re not lost.
You’re listening.
And that’s where everything begins again.
“The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”
—Maya Angelou
