The Roads That Built Me

The Roads That Built Me

I was twenty years old when my life changed direction.

I just didn’t know it yet.

I’d met a man.

Looking back, I realise I’d also met the next decade of my life.

The strange thing about life’s biggest turning points is that they never introduce themselves as such.

They look like ordinary days.

A conversation.

A decision.

Someone walking into your life.

You only realise you’ve changed direction when you look over your shoulder and discover the road behind you has disappeared.

That first road shaped me in more ways than I could have imagined.

When it ended, I wasn’t only grieving the relationship.

I was saying goodbye to the woman who had started the journey.

Betrayal is expensive.

It doesn’t just take the relationship.

It sends confidence packing too.

For a while, I wasn’t sure which loss I was trying hardest to recover from.

Then another road appeared.

An old friend wandered back into my life.

Not to rescue me.

Simply to remind me that I hadn’t disappeared.

Not long after, I discovered I was going to become a mother.

People often think life’s defining moments arrive wrapped in certainty.

Mine arrived wrapped in questions.

My son-shine didn’t come into this world to put my life back together.

He gave me a reason to build a different one.

Choosing to raise a child on my own wasn’t the future I’d imagined.

Then again, very little of my life has unfolded according to plan.

I’ve discovered plans are rather overrated.

Character isn’t.

People often ask where courage comes from.

I don’t think it appears overnight.

I think it grows every time you survive something you once believed would break you.

There comes a point in life when you realise your parents won’t always be there to catch you.

When that moment arrives, a part of you grows up whether you’re ready or not.

Mine came ten years ago.

Losing my parents didn’t stop the world.

It changed the way I looked at it.

I became slower to judge.

Quicker to forgive.

And somewhere through all of it, I realised I’d misplaced my fear of circumstance.

I never bothered looking for it again.

There was another chapter.

One that made me believe I had finally found home.

It didn’t last.

I wouldn’t have said this then.

I can say it now.

Not every chapter is meant to stay.

Some simply arrive to introduce us to another version of ourselves.

Looking back now, I don’t remember my life by birthdays.

I remember it by the handful of moments after which I was never quite the same person again.

Sometimes I wonder what the twenty-year-old version of me would ask if we met today.

I suspect she’d want to know whether everything worked out.

I’d probably give a sarcastic smile.

Life was never asking me to get it right.

It was asking me to keep going.

Today I turn fifty-three.

I still don’t know what’s waiting around the next bend.

For the first time in my life, that doesn’t trouble me.

Every crossroads I’ve stood at has asked me the same question.

Who will you become now?

The answer has never been waiting at the beginning of the road.

It’s always been further ahead.

So here’s to the next one.

I wonder who I’ll meet this time.

It might just be another version of myself.