Homebody & Heart

I Don’t Feel Like I Know What I’m Doing — and I’m Doing It Anyway

It’s been a while since I’ve written here. Not because I didn’t want to. Because I’ve been living inside a version of my life that didn’t have language yet.

I left the law firm after almost four years. Four years of knowing exactly where I fit, what was expected of me, and how to move through a day without questioning every step of it.

And now I am a real estate agent.

Which, structurally, is just waking up every day and choosing anxiety.

There is no training period where you quietly observe from the corner. You are immediately in it. Talking to lenders. Talking to clients. Talking to other agents who have been doing this since I was learning cursive.

Sometimes I hang up the phone and immediately replay the entire conversation, wondering if I sounded like a person who knew what she was talking about or a person who was hoping nobody would ask a follow-up question.

Nothing feels automatic. Everything feels load-bearing.

I am working with buyers now. Real people. Real decisions. Real consequences. And somehow, they trust me.

I don’t always understand why. But I’m slowly learning how to trust myself too.

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Meanwhile, life at home is also undergoing its own full restructuring.

My son has entered full toddler mode, which is less of a developmental stage and more of a philosophical position. He has opinions now. Strong ones. About everything. Including things that did not previously exist as decisions five minutes ago.

He also has his own room now.

This is historic, considering he has slept approximately four feet from me since birth. We’re in the early stages of the transition, which currently involves negotiations, emotional appeals, and what I can only describe as targeted resistance.

He looks at me now like a small union representative. I am outnumbered and underprepared.

We’re also waiting on the results of his autism evaluation. Nothing is wrong. Nothing is broken. We are just on the edge of understanding him more completely, which I want, even if I am occasionally nervous about what that understanding will ask of me.

Parenthood, it turns out, is mostly just adapting to a constantly shifting job description you were never formally trained for. You make decisions with incomplete information. You improvise. You hope you’re getting it mostly right.

And sometimes you are. Sometimes you’re absolutely not. And sometimes those two things are indistinguishable.

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There has been grief too.

Someone from my old life is gone now. And with him, a version of the world that used to feel stable.

I don’t want to make a big thing of it here. It’s not that kind of post. But I want to name it, because I think it’s part of why this season of my life has felt so unmoored. When someone dies, you don’t just lose them. You lose the version of yourself that existed in relation to them.

So that has been happening too.

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Some days, I feel like I’m falling behind in everything at once. Like the version of myself I was supposed to be by now is somewhere ahead of me and I am still over here sorting out basic logistics.

Other days, I catch something smaller and truer. A conversation that went fine. A moment where I didn’t second-guess myself. A quiet excitement about the life I am building, even when I cannot yet see its shape.

I don’t think reinvention looks the way we imagine it will. In my head it looked like a montage. In practice it looks like a lot of Sundays spent questioning my life choices while eating cereal standing up.

Nothing feels stable yet. But maybe stability isn’t something you start with. Maybe it’s something you build, inconsistently, between moments of doubt and moments of accidental clarity.

And if nothing else, I am becoming extremely qualified at waking up every day and choosing anxiety. Which, at this point, feels less like a personality flaw and more like professional development.