Buckle up and get comfy - this one it longer that the usual…
I woke up this morning with a thought that felt important. Clear, even - the kind that makes you sit up a little. And then, by the time I actually got out of bed, it was gone. I couldn't tell you a single word of it.
That happens to me more than I'd like to admit. But this one left something behind - not the words, just the shape of it. And when I sat with that shape for a while, I realized it wasn't about grief. It wasn't about transition, which is usually where my mind goes when I write here. It was something plainer than that, and honestly a little harder to pin down.
It was about adulting.
I usually think about adulting in the version where you buy good cheese and feel like you have your life together. But this one is more the real, unglamorous kind - the one nobody actually teaches you. As best I can tell, there were four things underneath it:- Take care of yourself - and not just the body. All of you: physical, emotional, mental, spiritual.
- You're not meant to do this life alone. None of us are.
- It's okay to take care of yourself before you've run yourself into the ground taking care of everyone else.
- And what "taking care of yourself" actually means keeps changing as you get older. Nobody warns you about that part either.
You've been keeping receipts on all four fronts, not just one.
The care that used to work has an expiration date. You were never supposed to do this solo. Put your own oxygen mask on first (yes, again, still, forever)
I want to walk through each of these honestly, not as a tidy list of advice, but as things I'm still learning myself.
One quick note before I do: I talk a lot in my work about the four energy bodies we're all carrying - physical, emotional, mental, spiritual. They're not separate departments running on separate schedules. They're one system. Neglect one long enough, and the others start picking up the slack.
Somewhere along the way a lot of us got fed the same terrible advice: Push through it. Rest is for later. Acting as if your body is basically a car - you gas it up, you drive it into the ground, and if it breaks, well, that's what mechanics are for.
Turns out that's not quite right!!! And it's not only about the body. It's all four parts of us.
✋ Physically, your body isn't quietly waiting in the background while you handle "real life" — it's taking notes the entire time. Every skipped meal, every "I'll sleep when I'm dead" night, every time you white-knuckled through something instead of resting — your nervous system was there for all of it, keeping a running tab. Rest isn't the boring intermission before the real show. Rest is the show. It's when the body does its actual repair work.
💞 Emotionally, the feelings you keep shoving to "deal with later" don't politely wait their turn. They leak. Into your patience, your sleep, your tone of voice with the people who least deserve it.
💁 Mentally, a brain that never gets to stop problem-solving doesn't get sharper - it gets foggier. That's not you losing your edge. That's you needing an actual off-switch, not a shorter to-do list.
😇 Spiritually, you can run for a surprisingly long time on empty before you notice - until one day you look up and realize you've been going through motions with nothing underneath them.
I've walked with a lot of people through hard seasons - grief, illness, life just generally throwing chairs - and the ones who come out the other side intact are almost never the toughest, most stoic, gritted-teeth types. They're the ones who kept some kind of actual relationship with all four parts of themselves the whole way through. Not just rest that was really rest and movement that felt good instead of punishing. Also space to actually feel the feelings, room to let the mind idle, and something - however small - that kept them tethered to meaning.
It’s worth the time being honest about knowing that whatever self-care formula worked for you at 25 probably isn't the one that works now. The workout that used to leave you buzzing might now leave you wrecked for three days. (this one I keep re-learning) Running on four hours of sleep and sheer willpower has quietly stopped being a trick and started being a liability.
This is not you getting soft. This is not you losing your edge. This is just... biology, doing its thing, the way it does for literally… every… human... who has ever aged past twenty-five. And it's not only physical - what actually settles your mind, moves your emotions, or feeds you spiritually shifts too. The meditation that used to calm you might now feel like sitting in a waiting room. The thing that used to feel like enough spiritually might now feel thin. (the music, the movement, the prayers all need a different depth)
The people who seem to age with some grace aren't the ones who found the one perfect routine and stuck with it forever. They're the ones who stayed curious. Who keep asking, "okay, what do I actually need right now, at this age, in this season" - instead of stubbornly running the same old software on a body that's been quietly upgrading itself the whole time.
This is the one I feel deeply and then of course keep foregtting to give it words… we are not meant to carry our lives by ourselves. Not the logistics, not the weight of it, not the meaning of it.
We get so good at performing fine. "Fine" on autopilot. Everyone leans on us, we're the reliable one, the one who's got it together - and there's something genuinely good in that. But it can also quietly turn into its own weird kind of loneliness, where everyone around you assumes you're fine simply because you're so convincing at pretending.
Adulting well was never about needing nobody. It's about deliberately building a small crew of people who actually walk with you - not just people you show up for, but people who show up for you, who'd notice if you went quiet under the weight of everyone else's stuff.
That crew doesn't just appear. You have to let it in. (and notice that it is there - and tend it)
But it's not only about the small crew of our “claimed” people. It’s also community, capital C - the wider net underneath the net. The people who aren't your closest three but who still know your name, who'd show up with a casserole or a ride to the airport or just a text that says "thinking of you" without you having to ask. Somewhere along the way "self-sufficient" got treated like the goal, and community started to feel optional - a nice-to-have instead of something we actually need to function like humans.
It isn't optional. We were built for it. Actual belonging - a church, a neighborhood, a team, a group chat that's been going for a decade, whatever your version is - does something a therapist, a partner, or your best friend alone can't fully do. It reminds you that you're part of something bigger than your own life, and that you don't have to hold the whole thing together by yourself because you're not the only load-bearing wall in the room.
If you don't have that right now, that's not a character flaw either - communities take time to build and even more courage to actually join. But it's worth asking: where could you let yourself be known a little more? Where could you show up not as the helper, but just as a person?
Yourself first, not last
We tend to treat our own needs like the last item on the list - the thing that gets attention only once everyone else's is handled. And then everyone else's needs never quite stop, so ours never quite get their turn.
You cannot keep giving from a place that's already empty, no matter how noble your intentions are or how many people are counting on you. Taking care of yourself first isn't selfish - it's what actually makes you capable of showing up for everyone else. Not a depleted, running-on-fumes version of you performing care. The real version, with something left to give.
So maybe that's the whole revelation, reassembled from whatever scraps my brain left me: adulting isn't about doing more, carrying more, proving more. It's about tending to all of who you are - physical, emotional, mental, spiritual - not just the one part that happens to be visible in a mirror. It's letting people walk with you, your close crew and your wider community both, instead of just carrying things for you. It's giving yourself permission to come first sometimes - not because you matter more than everyone else, but because you matter too. And it's staying honest that all of this keeps shifting, so you have to keep paying attention instead of coasting on autopilot.
You are not meant to do this life alone.
None of us are.
Honored to walk with you, Erin
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