New Chapters ◦ Chapter One: The Break ◦ Entry 1
Every good story has a twist. You think you know the plot, the characters, the ending until one sentence changes everything.
For years, I thought I knew mine. I could picture the next scene before it happened. I knew the setting by heart. I thought the cast was locked in, the ending already written.
And then, without warning, the story shifted.
In 2023, the first crack appeared. The marriage I thought would carry me through the rest of my life quietly came undone. At first, it felt unreal, like a draft I kept expecting to revise. But the pages kept turning whether I was ready or not.
By January of 2024, I had left the only career I’d ever known, fourteen years at the library, stepping into a job that didn’t yet feel like mine. I told myself it was a fresh start, but mostly it felt like standing on unfamiliar ground without a map.
The rest of the year kept rearranging itself around me. By fall, we sold the house. In October, the divorce became official. The boys and I packed our lives into boxes and moved in with my parents, our future suddenly compressed into a childhood bedroom and a few borrowed closets.
Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I stopped writing. Not deliberately. Not with a decision or a goodbye post. The words just went quiet. The blog went dark. The part of me that processed life in sentences and stories slipped into survival mode, and I didn’t have the bandwidth to notice what I was losing until it was already gone.
None of it happened with dramatic finality. It unfolded in paperwork, packing tape, forwarded mail, and conversations I wasn’t ready to have yet, the kind of change that doesn’t announce itself as a crisis, but quietly unthreads the life you thought you were standing on.
The chapter I thought I was in closed before I was ready. The characters changed. The scenery blurred. The future I’d been writing toward was suddenly gone.
Plot twists don’t always feel exciting. Sometimes they feel like loss. Like standing in the middle of a book you’ve been living in and realizing you’re not in the right story anymore.
I didn’t ask for a rewrite. I didn’t want a new storyline. I wanted the one I knew, the one I’d been building. But the pen was already moving, and the words were already changing.
What surprised me most wasn’t just what I lost, the marriage, the house, the version of myself I recognized, but how quickly everything stacked on top of itself. There was no single dramatic collapse. Just a steady compression of change, each shift tightening the frame around what my life looked like.
One page turned.
And suddenly, everything I thought I knew about the story I was living no longer applied.
This post is part of my New Chapters series — personal essays about rebuilding, resilience, and writing what comes next. Visit the New Chapters landing page to explore the full series and read it in order.
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