This is Lisa's fault.

Yesterday, I found myself sitting on my therapist's couch, my brain short-circuiting on every worst-case scenario floating through it. And my therapist said, "Girl... you need to write." And while Lisa explained that there's something special about putting pen to paper, the things I feel compelled to write... they need to stay anonymous. So needless to say, a journal stuffed under the mattress is a no-go.

La Push, Washington

Afterall, I can't blow up my life.

And surprisingly... that's not the first time I've said that over the last few weeks.

So, here I am. A girl with a therapist.

Girl? No. I guess I'm a woman. A woman on the second career of her life, with a husband and children, a house, hundreds of responsibilities...

And you know what? I still have absolutely no idea what I'm doing in this life. You think your parents had it all figured out? It's the same lie that's been passed down generation after generation. Newsflash, your parents had no idea what they were doing either.

Quick question... Do you remember where you were on 9/11? What about when the world shut down because of COVID?

I refer to these types of events as fault lines. To me, fault lines are moments in time when the landscape of your life changes because enough pressure has finally been applied to rupture what you knew. That pressure creates a very clearly defined before and after.

Afterwards, the before is gone. It's left only to memories. Because now you're living in the after... and everything looks so very different.

What did life look like in your before? Before... the Twin Towers fell. Before... COVID shut everything down. Before... the levee broke. Before... the internet changed the world as we knew it.

If you're honest with yourself, you have other fault lines, too.... don't you? You know the ones the world is blissfully unaware even exist? The mysteries no one else even knows they need to solve? The ones that stay silent, locked in your heart, until your last breath.

I have a few.

But nothing leaving me with an after as big as the after I'm sitting in now.

Just like most fault lines, it started small. It was a fleeting thought. A lingering touch. A joke that hung awkwardly in the air. Patterns that left more questions than answers.

But over time, the pressure grew. And on a very unexpected night, the landscape of my entire mindset... of my entire life... changed.

You find me here today, writing to you from my after.

From the outside looking in, my after looks exactly like my before. To the world, I'm the same person I was almost four weeks ago (to the minute!). No one in my life has the slightest clue that something has changed. My family continues to live just as we always have, going through the motions of every day life.

But unlike everyone else in my life, I know I'm in the after. I know this with complete certainty because, just like all fault lines do, mine changed my life.

My life appears to be the same.

But how I move through it has changed.

At first, I wanted to describe my fault line as an event that gray-washed all of the dreams I once had. Dreams that were once painted in vibrant colors now seemed capable of printing only in grayscale. But really... if you look closely, those dreams are still painted in the same colors they always were.

It's just that now, standing in the after, I notice they've faded ever so slightly... Because my after has painted new dreams in colors I didn't even know existed. My after quietly urges me to consider... and to want... a future that leaves me completely in awe. And it's important to note that this dream, freshly painted in vivid color here in the after, only exists because of this fault line. A fault line that clearly defines the after... and highlights everything that's different from my before.

A before I never want to know again.

Not created by a plane crash.

Not created by a levee breaking.

Not created by a tragic event.

But my before?

It includes a version of me who is no longer here.

Someone I loved. Someone I appreciated. But someone who is no longer here.

And I admit... I can no longer live there.

Because my before...

Was before...

Her.