The futility I feel in writing this into an algorithmic void is almost enough to keep me from writing it at all. But I’ve come to notice, as I get older, that when difficult truths start rising and I don’t express them, I start feeling raw. It’s visceral. Not at all recommended by cardiologists. Pacifists either.

I’m smiling like I mean it. The moment I see my image reflected back to me, I am reminded of Glennon Doyle’s definition of beautiful. As she describes it, it’s less of a statement about a person’s appearance and more about witnessing them in a moment when they are filled up with beauty—whether it be from nature or art or love. Beautiful as in full of beauty.

I shift in my conference room chair, taking mini sips from my steel cup to interrupt my body’s warning signals.

I have to get out of here.

Mere minutes before I’m supposed to go on stage and pitch my memoir to a panel of agents, in front of an audience of my peers at this writing retreat, the grief reaches my throat.

Fuck. Not now. Not here.

When my girls left for college, I saw the Facebook posts of those giddy parents who skidded out of the parking lot after helping their last child move into their college dorm. I smiled at their joyriding into this new chapter of their adult lives. My take was slightly different. In fact, some might even liken it to a one-car procession of the funereal variety. I followed my morose drive home with three days on the couch, grieving a part of my identity that was no longer appropriate or healthy to hold on to as a source of daily fulfillment.

I am starting to see my family tree like a never-ending relay race, where one generation passes the baton to the next, picking up speed as each of us takes her turn to run in the world.

When I think of my grandma growing up on a farm in Oklahoma, married at the age of sixteen and having my mom at the age of eighteen, I am stunned by the ways in which my mom’s, mine, and my daughters’ young lives have differed.

Every so often a quote will grab me by the collar. Well, that’s not entirely true since I am so into comfort these days that I’d be hard pressed to find a shirt stretchy enough that includes an actual collar, but you get the idea.

It goes against everything I have ever aspired to be to choose “less” as my word for the year ahead. Hell, even my last name of the past 31 years is Moore.

I first started claiming a word of the year when my mom was in rapid decline. I chose “acceptance” for the first two years of this practice because no other word made as much sense while watching one of the greatest loves I will ever know fade away from me and be utterly powerless over it.

I like to think I have an active imagination, but my daughters say the technical term for what I have is “anxiety.” For the record, I think my daughters are rude.

Why is it cute and book-worthy when a kid in a wolf costume has wild daydreams about adventures in the jungle and not when a middle-aged woman sees a mysterious box tied with a bow on the beach and wonders if it could be a portable meth lab?