Please Don't Use Your Teeth
"She had somewhere else to be."
Let me paint you a picture.
It's this morning. I'm barely caffeinated. Jacob walks in and tells me he had a dream we were fighting because I was convinced I looked like a hagfish. If you don't know what a hagfish is, please Google it and then immediately un-Google it. They look like a... okay, they look like a penis with teeth. That's what I was insisting I looked like in his dream. And he was over there trying to tell me I was beautiful.
Sounds about right, doesn't it? We are always — always — the harshest critics of ourselves.
So here's your reminder, and mine: give yourself some damn grace. At least you don't have a c*ck with teeth.
This week though? This week was genuinely, unexpectedly, kind of beautifully solid.
I hit my goal weight.
I'll say that again because I still can't fully believe it: I hit my goal weight. Sixty pounds down. Six. Zero. Since last June I've been on this train — Tirzepatide, peptides, my husband who compounds them (actual champion of this story, please applaud him) — and this week it arrived at the station. I didn't even realize I had that much to lose, and honestly I'm blessed that curvy has always worked for me. But sixty pounds is not a small number and I'm letting myself feel that.
Last night Josey told me to stop losing weight because I no longer have boobs. Or an a**. Both. Gone. Which is... not a sentence I ever imagined someone would say to me. There are approximately 3,027 squats in my future and I'm choosing to see that as a project, not a problem. But I feel good. Like actually good. The weird, unfamiliar kind where you keep waiting for the other shoe to drop and it just... doesn't.
My newish client has slowly become my favorite.
You know how they say just being yourself attracts the right people? I slid the word f*ck into slide two of the pitch deck just to make sure she was my people. She was. She told me my content for them was "too safe."
TOO SAFE.
Step Brothers fans — you know the scene. We are best friends now. (If you don't get that reference, we probably wouldn't be great friends IRL and that's okay, we can still work together.)
The writing this week though. Woof.
Revisiting the hard parts again — again — is cattle prod level painful. Just poking the wounds, on purpose, by choice, repeatedly. Wild how that's the job now. But this book needs to make you laugh and cry, sometimes in the same paragraph. The kind of thing that's actually worth your time. So I keep going back in.
Manuscript Update:
19/19 chapters complete (structure)
Chapters 1–13 enrichment: Complete
13 of 19 chapters are now fully alive. 6 to go.
Current word count: 50,460
Chapters 14–19: In progress (we're going back into the hard ones)
Emotional damage from revisiting: Assessed. Ongoing. Worth it.
And because I haven't given you enough this week, I'll leave you with something that cracked me open. I was sitting in the locker room while Josey was at practice, listening to Seth Godin on Audible, when this line stopped me cold:
"When the person you could have been meets the person you are becoming — is it going to be a cause for celebration or a cause for heartbreak?"
I hit the back-15 button three times. Wrote it down twice.
My becoming moment wasn't dramatic. It was the day my boss reminded me — for the seventeenth time — to complete my sexual harassment and fire safety learning modules. Third strike territory. Write-up incoming. And I gave exactly zero sh*ts, because that same week I'd landed my first client. Four hundred dollars for a month of work. I barely knew what I was doing. But something in me had already left the building.
Even though it took another two years to actually quit.
The version of me I was becoming didn't care about the 22-cent expense report discrepancy either, for what it's worth.
She had somewhere else to be.
This week I had three middle schoolers screaming Baby Got Back in my Subaru on the way to youth group. I'm basically running an unofficial after-school dinner-and-Red-Bull sponsorship program that I absolutely cannot afford and absolutely will not stop.
I blinked and Josey is already where she is. I'm not blinking again.
Still becoming. Still not resolved. Still here. 🤍
