What I Couldn’t Pack
When everything is stripped away — career, identity, the version of yourself you worked so hard to build — what remains? Flor writes about the year she fell apart, and what she found when she stopped trying to hold it all together.
The boxes came off the truck in a state I did not grow up in.
I unpacked them. I found a pediatrician. I learned which grocery store was worth the extra ten minutes. I stood in the back of three churches before I found the one where I stopped feeling like a visitor.
Making friends from scratch is hard. You do it slowly, over school pickup and borrowed casserole dishes, and it takes longer than anyone tells you.
Meanwhile there was a business my husband and I were building — early mornings, late invoices, a hundred small decisions nobody sees. There were two girls who needed dinner whether or not I felt like making it. There was a house that did not run itself.
I was busy. I was useful. I was, most days, happy.
And I was fairly sure I would never conduct another interview.
That is the part I did not say out loud. Not to my husband, not to anyone. I had a good life and no complaint I could have filed. But some quiet arithmetic had run in the back of my mind and come out the same way every time: that chapter is closed. You had it. It was good. It is over now.
I had spent my life building something. A voice. A career. A brand, if we are being honest about the language of this industry. And I had believed, without ever quite saying it, that those things were the point. That if I was working, if people were listening, then I was fine.
The work stopped. And I found out what was left.
What was left was a woman making school lunches. A woman learning a new city one street at a time. A woman sitting in a pew where nobody knew what she used to do for a living.
I thought I was waiting.
I was being made.
Because the interviews did come back. Not the way they were before, and not because I forced them — I had stopped asking. They came back to someone who had spent years learning things you cannot learn in a newsroom. How a family holds together. What it costs to start over. Why the story of a woman in a small church in a town she did not choose is worth telling carefully.
I could not have done this work at twentysomething. I did not know enough yet.
So if you are in the season where nothing is technically wrong and something in you is not where it belongs — if you are useful and busy and quietly sure the thing you were made for has passed you by — I would say this.
You are not waiting.
Some things do not survive the move.
And some things are only being built where no one can see them.