A Midyear Reflection: When One Door Closes, a Window Opens

Marriage, death, and the messy middle of becoming

The realest thing I read recently was this: To be a human is to say goodbye a lot.

This simple yet heavy realization came from the one and only Mari Andrew, in one of her recent posts that I, without fail, read to feed my soul. I swear she’s a mind reader, everything she writes feels like a delicious little snack I didn’t know I needed.

We’re halfway through the year, and I’ve been doing a lot of journaling—a mental year-in-review, because who doesn’t love one? Honestly, it's just an attempt to process what these past few months have looked and felt like. The culmination of June, the start of summer, feels like the perfect time to take stock, to reflect on what’s been, and to imagine what might come. For me, 2025 has been all about goodbyes. This actually started late last year, but hit full stride this year.

I’ve been overwhelmed, overstimulated. I’ve felt a lot—mostly a swirl of emotions, though surprisingly more positive than negative. I think it’s because underneath the discomfort, the sadness, and the nostalgia, saying goodbye feels painfully natural—though still incredibly hard. The truth is, we’re better at hellos. We cling to people and places far more easily than we let them go. It feels safer to return to what we know (or to stay still) than to take the next step. Saying goodbye is like leaving home for good, but taking a fridge magnet as a souvenir, or tucking away a memory you can revisit, even if you’ll never truly relive it.

I hesitated to write this because there’s no way to do it without getting personal. But I think it’s important. I think it honors the moment I’m in. And selfishly, it helps me get out of my own head. This is what this year has looked like:

I got married in December and moved continents.

To my own surprise and the surprise of many, after years of non-committal relationships, some deep connections, situationships, and stretches of abstinence (a sort of balance to the two very young, very long relationships that shaped my teens and twenties), at 35, we—my now-husband and I—put a ring on it. I’ll share more about marriage and my marvelous husband in a future post.

What no one tells you about choosing someone for life—especially when you’re older (or maybe this was just my journey)—is that it requires a whole lot of saying goodbye.

I hate to quote Reed from Black Doves (because I really did not like that show), but she says, “When a door closes, a window opens.” And that’s kind of how I feel about this whole chapter.

It wasn’t easy to close ‘open tabs’. To leap without a plan. To make room for a whole other human being. Life was good. I had two cats (thankfully, I still have the cats), an apartment I loved, financial stability, and a job that mostly fulfilled me—or at least kept me busy enough to not notice how unfulfilled I actually was. I was (and still am) young enough to feel like life is wide open, but old enough to know I’ve got the tools and experience to navigate it. My now-husband and I didn’t have the smoothest start—there was distance, language barriers, cultural differences, and more. Choosing this life meant saying goodbye to a lot, so we could be closer in every way that mattered.

This relationship has made me deeply uncomfortable at times. It’s pushed me to show up differently, more fully—and that’s still a work in progress—but one I’m grateful for every single day. It also led to a big move I had dreamed about for years. I’ve always been a bit of a free spirit, drawn to the idea of living in different places. Now I find myself living in Rota, a sweet beach town in the south of Spain. Saying goodbye to my lovely one-bedroom-and-den apartment, my car, my gym, my personal trainer of 15 years, my routine, my family and friends, Target (!), and my busy corporate job was not easy. But those goodbyes opened windows.

In their place: companionship, grace, rest, pause, a healthier, more balanced life, more honesty with myself and others. Possibility.

This path has meant goodbye to the fixed, the familiar, the routine—and hello to a life that moves me, that supports me. The goodbyes have not been easy, but they’ve been necessary.

I had a missed abortion.

In the world of goodbyes, this is saying goodbye to something—or someone—that never was. It sounds terrible, and I still don’t fully know how I feel about it. I’m sad, but not too sad. I feel guilty, even though I know it wasn’t my fault. Missed abortions are so much more common than we think, and it’s only after sharing that other women open up and say, "Me too." Some go through it multiple times before carrying a healthy pregnancy.

Oddly, I also feel grateful. The pregnancy, however brief, gave me clarity and brought me so much closer to my husband. I didn’t truly know I wanted a baby until I was pregnant. And even though I’ve never experienced pregnancy for more than 7 weeks, it changed things. Pregnancy is a goodbye, too. Goodbye to raw fish and wine, yes—but also to the idea of life as just the two of us. Goodbye to carelessness. Goodbye to skipping breakfast. Suddenly, it’s not about what you want, it’s about what’s best for what you’re growing inside you.

When an ultrasound shows no growth, no heartbeat, it breaks your heart in a very specific way—a grief for what could have been. I tend to be practical in hard moments, but this kind of experience does something to you. There is a before and after. A new awareness of fragility. Of how brave you have to be to even try. I said goodbye to that pregnancy. But I also said hello to a new kind of brave. And to the idea that maybe, someday, I want to be a mother.

I left the corporate world.

Saying goodbye to a job isn’t unusual. But for me, it was massive. Work has always been everything. I’ve worked since I was 16. At 36, I realized my identity, my value, my self-worth had been wrapped up in my work: the constant traveling (love a hotel bed), the 12-hour + days, the boozy lunches, the friends, the titles. The pride in my parents’ faces when they told people where I worked. The feeling when a partner introduced me as someone "heading PR at..."

I didn’t realize how ingrained it all was until I had to walk away. I moved to Spain and tried to hold on to my position, even though I knew it was no longer fulfilling. I was allowed to stay on remotely for a month, but ultimately had to resign. It felt like a very obvious sign from the universe to LET GO.

Let go of meetings that could’ve been emails. Let go of using work to distract myself from the things that truly matter to me.

What did this give me? A much-needed  break. Mental space. Time. Creative energy. Room to start shaping my own business. I won’t lie—this goodbye has  left me feeling unsure of what I want, what I’m good at, or even what matters most to me. But I’ll take those questions in exchange for the possibility of building something that aligns with who I am now.

I experienced an unexpected family death.

My mom hates the month of June. It might sound dramatic, but she’s lived through a lot of personal loss during this month—illness, death, chaos, life-altering diagnoses. And now, this...

A few weeks ago, I got a 5:30 AM call. My 40-year-old cousin died in a motorcycle accident.

It’s impossible to put into words what I felt: shock, heartbreak, physical pain. A weird sense that he’d already been gone (maybe because of distance), and yet... he’s still here somehow. It felt like a family-wide heartbreak—a shared weight that we’re all trying to carry so it doesn’t crush any one of us.

This goodbye was sudden. Brutal. And inescapable. But it taught me something: sometimes, you have to stop trying to make sense of things. You just accept. And grieve.

My cousin was reserved, observant, adventurous, and hard-working. He had no idea, but he was a big reason I picked up drawing. I remember us as kids—him sitting on the floor at my grandparents’ house, surrounded by paper and markers, tongue sticking out in concentration as he sketched. I’d sit beside him, copy his every move, and feel like a cool cat. That’s the figurative keepsake magnet I’m placing on the fridge with this goodbye.

All of this to echo what Mari said so simply: To be human is to say goodbye a lot. I’d even add—a whole lot. But the very fact that we get to say goodbye means we’re alive. It means we’re not static. It means there are still so many hellos waiting.

The goodbyes I’ve had to say over the past six months—the big and small ones, the sacrifices, the letting go, the moments I’ve missed—have been bittersweet. But somehow, they’ve also felt like coming home to myself. And for all of it, I’m grateful.