This week was hard.

The kind of hard that seeps into your bones and lingers behind your eyes. The kind where the days blur, and you find yourself wondering: When does the hard fade? When does the breeze of ease finally come into sight?

I feel like I’m riding on a carousel in fast forward, jumping from task to task, challenge to challenge, barely catching my breath before the next spin begins. Work has been unrelenting, a chaotic distraction from the uncertainty of where I am headed.  All day stretches of meetings, troubleshooting problems, building growth strategies, and trying, truly trying—to inspire a team that doesn’t always meet me with the same fire.  I show up ready to collaborate with my leadership team, but many days it feels like I’m carrying the torch alone. And the truth is, in my business unit, I am alone. The only woman in leadership. It’s not a crown I wear with pride, it’s a quiet reminder of how far we still have to go.

While work spins, the house pulls at me too. The prep for inspections and mountain of boxes unearthed from closets, cubbies, and crawlspaces, filled with much more than the ghosts of holidays past. I’ve sorted through dozens beyond dozens of gift bags and tangled lights, decorations galore and quiet memories, and carried them, one by one, down to the garage. Because Sunday morning is the neighborhood garage sale, and ready or not, everything must go. I hate garage sales and this one in particular is forcing me to assign value to pieces of my past and negotiate the price of letting go. All while questioning if I am approaching this change the right way? Is there a right way?

And then, in the middle of all of the chaos, I added two unexpected trips to the vet. My faithful furry friend and my steady heartbeat in this chaos has had more tests. They confirmed what I already feared: her disease is progressing. Slowly, yes. But still, it’s moving. And now I’m wondering: will this move be too much for her? Or will the quiet of a new place: just she and I, starting over, be exactly what we both need? She’s been by my side through it all, often the only soul in the room who never questions, never judges, and never asks for more than my presence. I don’t want to break her spirit with mine still under construction.

And in case I needed a bonus twist, I learned this week that when you’re legally separated, you have to file taxes as single. Surprise! I had filed an extension, thinking this would be the last year of “us” on paper. But apparently, even the IRS knows it’s over. Another detail of divorce I didn’t see coming.

And in the midst of all this, I’m waiting. Waiting on the final inspection results, expected today, but now I am told tomorrow or Monday. Will we stay on track, or will something break the momentum? It’s as if I’ve packed my hope into boxes too, and now I’m just waiting for permission to move forward.

Flirting with my future this week doesn’t feel like a romance, it feels like resilience. It looks like me, holding together a business, a home, a loyal friend, and a heart that still has jagged edges. It looks like navigating leadership in a space where no one looks like me. It looks like sorting through memories in a dusty garage, while quietly asking the universe to send me one clear sign that I’m doing the right thing.

The garage sale will be here soon enough, complete with haggling strangers carrying off fragments of my past, one mismatched mug at a time!  Maybe all this sorting and pricing my past, all this waiting and wondering, is more than just a checklist of endings. Maybe it’s the groundwork for something new. And so, maybe, just maybe, I can finally start scoping out the set of the next chapter. Not with certainty, but with a little less fear, and a little more space to imagine what comes next.