The Empty Plate

It is an exhausting way to live, earning your own welcome, over and over, forever, and I had lived it so long I did not know there was another way.

And in the quiet of that year after the divorce, alone in the condo I owned, running the company I had built, surrounded by the few people who valued me for reasons that had nothing to do with my bank account, I learned, slowly, to rest.

To believe I had done enough simply by being who I was.

To understand that my worth was not a thing I had to keep purchasing with usefulness, but a thing I already, permanently, possessed.

That was the deepest gift the empty plate finally gave me: not the freedom from Theresa’s demands, though that mattered, but freedom from the belief that I had to earn my place in the world at all.