So ... What the fuck happened!?

 There are certain things you just assume are going to happen to you.

You don't necessarily make a detailed five-year plan about them. You don't sit down with a spreadsheet and write husband by 29, child one by 31, child two by 33, emotional stability by 35, matching towels by 37. You just assume that at some point, life will move in the general direction you've always imagined it would.

For me, motherhood was always one of those things.

When I was little, I wanted to be a mom. Not in some vague, "maybe someday" kind of way. It felt inevitable. Of course I'd grow up and have children. Of course I'd have a partner. Of course there would eventually be a house full of noise and toys and someone asking me where their other shoe was while I stood there knowing full well it had been on their foot twelve seconds earlier.

I just assumed I'd get there.

I'm 33 now.

There are no children.

There isn't even a partner.

Which is becoming a bit of a logistical problem when your lifelong dream involves producing a human being with another human being.

And before anyone suggests IVF, adoption, or some other wonderfully well-intentioned solution, I know there are many paths to motherhood. This isn't really about the mechanics of getting a baby. It's about the fact that I always imagined I'd have someone to share that life with. Someone who loved me. Someone who chose me. Someone who would stand beside me while we collectively wondered why we'd voluntarily created a tiny person who screams because their banana broke in half.

At 33, I genuinely thought I'd be loved by a partner by now.

Not necessarily in some ridiculous romantic-comedy way where we drink wine in a beautifully decorated kitchen while somehow never having to clean anything. I'm talking about the ordinary kind of love. Someone who knows me. Someone who comes home to me. Someone whose toothbrush is always mysteriously wet despite their insistence that they haven't used it. Someone who wants to build a life with me.

I thought I'd have that.

And the uncomfortable part is that I can't even say I've spent the last fifteen years bravely putting myself out there, getting rejected over and over again, and eventually collapsing dramatically onto the floor while the universe laughed at me.

I haven't.

I've barely tried.

Because I don't feel good about the way I look.

There. That's the ugly truth underneath a lot of my perfectly reasonable excuses.

I don't like being looked at. I don't like my body. I don't like clothes that fit too closely because then, tragically, they reveal that I have a body underneath them. I especially don't like the idea of wearing something actually stylish and fitted because my brain immediately convinces me that the second I leave the house, everyone will stop what they're doing and stare at me like I've just walked into a restaurant wearing a live raccoon.

Nobody is thinking about me that much, obviously. I know this. Most people are far too busy worrying about themselves, their own bodies, their own lives, and whether that email they sent at 9:43 this morning sounded passive-aggressive.

But knowing something logically and believing it emotionally are two very different things.

So I hide.

I wear clothes that make me feel invisible and then look in the mirror and feel like I look like a slob. Then I feel bad about looking like a slob, which makes me want to hide even more, which means I don't put myself in situations where anyone might meet me, which means I remain single, which then confirms the deeply scientific hypothesis that nobody wants me.

It's a fantastic system.

I've essentially built myself a tiny emotional prison and then spent years wondering why nobody has come inside.

But I don't think this is just ordinary insecurity.

Everyone has baggage. Everyone has things they're working through. People say they're "damaged" because they're jealous, or because they have trust issues, or because they get weird when their boyfriend likes an Instagram photo of another woman.

I'm talking about something deeper.

I'm talking about never really learning what emotional care is supposed to feel like. Never being properly taught how to trust someone, how to feel safe with someone, how to accept affection without immediately wondering when the other shoe is going to drop. Never being given the foundation that seems to allow other people to walk through life assuming they're worthy of being loved.

Some people learn those things so early they don't even realize they're learning them.

For me, it feels like trying to assemble emotional adulthood from an IKEA manual with half the pages missing.

And naturally, the missing pages are the important ones.

Sometimes I genuinely wonder if I'm too damaged.

Not "damaged" in the trendy, vaguely mysterious way people use the word when they want to make their personality sound interesting. I mean actually damaged.

What if something important was supposed to be built in me when I was very young and simply wasn't? What if I'm trying to build relationships with tools I never learned how to use?

How do you believe someone could genuinely want you when you've spent so much of your life believing there must be something fundamentally wrong with you? How do you let someone see you when you've spent years trying not to be seen?

And then there is my Nana.

The anniversary of her death is coming up again.

A year.

I don't know how that happened so quickly. Grief is strange because the calendar seems to have absolutely no respect for your emotional schedule. You can still feel like someone died yesterday while the rest of the world has apparently decided, "Well, it's been twelve months, better keep it moving."

For some reason, as that anniversary gets closer, the fact that I'm not a mother yet has been sitting much heavier on me.

I wanted her to see me become a mother.

I wanted to give her that.

I know, logically, that I didn't owe her a grandchild. My life wasn't some assignment I was supposed to complete before she died. She loved me because I was me, not because I was supposed to reproduce on a convenient timeline.

But grief isn't logical.

Grief is an asshole.

It takes perfectly reasonable thoughts and twists them until they hurt.

Part of me keeps thinking, Great. I didn't get to give her that while she was here, and now she's gone, and I still haven't done it.

And that's where the guilt creeps in.

Because it's not even like I tried and life simply didn't cooperate. I haven't met someone. I haven't put myself out there. I haven't exactly been standing on the front porch of my life waving a giant sign that says, "Hello, I'm emotionally available and looking for a husband."

I've mostly been behind the curtains hoping nobody notices me.

Which makes it difficult to complain that nobody has knocked on the door.

I've spent years waiting to feel confident enough. Pretty enough. Thin enough. Normal enough. Ready enough. As if one morning I'm going to wake up and suddenly become a woman who can put on a cute outfit without wanting to cover herself with a decorative throw pillow, download a dating app, and think, Sure. Why the hell not? Someone might actually like me.

I've been waiting for that woman to show up.

She hasn't.

At this point, I'm beginning to suspect she's not coming.

Maybe I have to go get her.

And honestly, that sounds exhausting.

Because I don't know how to suddenly become comfortable being seen. I don't know how to date when the idea of someone actually looking at me makes me want to crawl under a blanket and remain there until the outside world has hopefully lost interest. I don't know how to undo years of feeling like there was something fundamentally wrong with me.

And I don't know whether I'm going to become a mother.

That's the sentence that scares me the most.

When you're a little girl dreaming about your future, you don't imagine that one day you'll be 33 and wondering whether the thing you always assumed would happen simply won't. You don't imagine that the life you pictured so clearly could become a life you have to actively chase.

You don't imagine time becoming something you can actually feel.

But I'm starting to feel it.

Every birthday. Every Christmas. Every pregnancy announcement. Every baby photo. Every family gathering where another person is talking about school drop-offs and bedtime routines while I'm standing there trying to remember whether I put deodorant on.

It's another reminder that everyone else seems to be moving through chapters I thought I'd have reached by now.

And maybe that's why this hurts as much as it does.

I'm not only grieving my Nana.

I'm grieving the life I thought I'd have by this age. The husband I thought I'd have. The children I thought I'd be raising. The version of myself I thought I'd become.

And maybe I'm also grieving the little girl who thought all of those things were guaranteed.

She didn't know she'd grow up and be afraid of her own reflection. She didn't know she'd become so terrified of rejection that she'd choose invisibility instead. She didn't know she'd spend years wanting to be loved while simultaneously making herself almost impossible to find.

She just knew she wanted to be a mom.

And now she's 33, and she's looking at me like, So...what the fuck happened?

I don't have a beautiful answer for her.

I don't have a husband. I don't have kids. I don't have a five-year plan. I don't even have an outfit that makes me feel like the woman I imagine other people see when they look at me.

But I'm starting to understand something painfully obvious:

If I want a life I don't currently have, hiding from the possibility of it isn't going to make it appear.

I can spend another five years waiting until I feel pretty enough to date. I can keep wearing clothes designed to disguise me. I can keep telling myself I'm not ready.

And then one day I could look up and be 38, or 40, or 45, wondering what might have happened if I'd just given myself a chance.

That possibility scares me more than dating does.

Because maybe I won't find someone. Maybe I won't become a mother. Maybe some of the things I always assumed were waiting for me simply aren't.

I don't get guarantees.

None of us do.

But I think I owe that little girl something better than spending the rest of my life hiding from the possibility.

Maybe I don't need to love my body before I let someone else see it. Maybe I don't need to become completely healed before I let someone get close to me. Maybe I don't need to stop being damaged before I start living.

Maybe I just need to stop treating my fear as if it's a prophecy.

I'm still scared. I'm still insecure. I still look at fitted clothing like it's a personal attack. And I'm still not entirely convinced that anyone is going to look at me and think, Yep. Her. That's the one.

But maybe I need to find out.

Because I don't want to spend the rest of my life wondering if I could have been loved simply because I was too afraid to let anyone try.

And if I ever do become a mother, I hope I can tell my child that they don't have to spend their whole life waiting until they're perfect enough to be loved. I hope I can teach them that they are worth being seen. I hope I can teach them that they don't have to earn tenderness.

And maybe, somewhere along the way, I can finally learn that lesson too.