Old Ruts, Dodgy Ankles, and Plaid Pants
We’ve probably all been in this scenario, several times over the course of our lives, where we’re shedding an old identity while stepping into the new one. It’s an odd mix of peeling off an ill-fitting old dress that didn’t flatter you anymore, while simultaneously pulling on a really cool pair of plaid pants that make you feel powerful in a 1970’s golfer-type of way.
I’m in the midst of doing that goofy looking hopping around one does in the dressing room, as the old dress makes way for the plaid pants. It’s awkward - I’m in my ungraceful, vulnerable, and slightly ridiculous-feeling era.
The old, ill-fitting dress was bound up in abandoning myself to meet others’ expectations - at work, in friendship, in marriage - and drove me to an exhaustion that still sneaks up and surprises me sometimes.
The plaid pants I’m happily embracing are woven with self-love, personal responsibility, and so many steady rituals to support my becoming that candles, journals, and tea are taking over the majority of my personal budget.
I’m operating in the belief that what I experience in my world is a reflection of my internal state, and my internal state hardened into some seriously unhelpful ruts.
The plaid pants feel right, but the old dress still has a way of trying to zip itself back up.
On my way back from California a few weeks ago, I felt a heaviness start to settle in. Familiar scenery, familiar names popping up on my cell phone, and a mental to-do list starting to draft line after line of things that needed doing once I got home.
My struggle hides in daily routine, and routine is precisely where I’ve hidden myself for decades. Hyper-responsibility makes a really noble dress to wear to impress others, but it sure costs you your own identity.
I left a profitable career to force a pause. Hustle culture and being a “lady boss” sounded powerful in the beginning, but it focused my efforts on external approval over internal peace and joy. Not worth it, even if it was socially acceptable.
Sometimes it takes leaving to come back different.
While traveling, I was thinking about how freeing it felt to show up as the new version of myself I knew was emerging. No justification, no explanation required. The people alongside me at the retreat I attended knew me only as the calm lady taking a lot of notes. No performance, no proving that I was capable, or could solve problems, just me.
Travel lets me be the new Samantha without twisting an ankle in the old ruts.
But the real work - and the real magic - is in the homecoming.
I’m realizing I don’t have to leave the emerging me at the boarding gate. I’m intentionally bringing pieces of that new way of being into my living room and into my routine. It’s in the structure I create for each day, the slower approach to nourishing my body, and showing my kids peaceful presence, not just a list of chores.
It’s a refusal to let the familiar scenery dictate a familiar, exhausted internal state. It’s unzipping that old, uncomfortable dress over and over, and choosing the plaid pants with joy, knowing someday the dress will stay on the fitting room floor, right where it belongs.
