The Pink Room

On returning to yourself, and loving her this time.

May 06, 2026

I came home crying.

It was good crying. The tears felt like relief and rose up in pools of warmth from somewhere deep in me before I even understood what was happening. It almost felt like they had been pooling for years, just waiting for the day and season that I unlearned holding them back.

It was a Sunday, nine days before I turned 40. I had spent the morning at brunch, the afternoon with my girls, and the early evening in a virtual room full of women writers. I drove home with my hands loose on the wheel, my city sliding past the windows like a film I had already seen and already loved.

When I got and went to my bedroom to change into my Sunday comfits, my husband, a man of few words and enormous, architecturally precise love, had made me a poster board. A handwritten poster board, counting down to my 40th birthday. It had a highlight reel of who I already am and everything I have already done, laid out in his careful handwriting like a document of proof of his observations.

He stood in the doorway. As I held it in my hands. I wept. He embraced me as my body vibrated with emotion. We let go and he left to give me room to feel the grandiosity of my emotions.

I called my childhood soul sister. She answered on the first ring, the way she always has. Her voice carried familiarity, steadiness and warmth, which only comes from someone who knew you before you knew yourself. I tried to tell her about the day, the weight and fullness of it, the way the Universe had arranged itself around me like something that had been in the works for a long time. I couldn’t get the words out. She didn’t need them.

“I cannot believe you’re almost 40,” she said. “Honest to god it was yesterday we were laying on the carpet in your pink room writing notes and giggling over teen life.”

And that’s when I lost it even more.

The pink room.

It was the formal living room of my childhood house, pristine and a little untouchable. The room kept for company and nicer occasions. The carpet was thick and pale, allowing for the ornate carved wood and intricately designed pink cushions to pop. The furniture sat in careful arrangements. The adults moved through it with a reverence, a space that belongs to tomorrow’s guests.

My soul sister and I inhabited it, the room technically off limits was the perfect room to hold the limitlessness of our stories and secrets.

We would stretch ourselves across that carpet and do what girls do: giggle, write notes, whisper the language of our friendship while still figuring out its grammar. We eventually would migrate upstairs to my bedroom, where the walls were pink and the room ran warmer than the rest of the house, heat collecting there like it had nowhere else to go. She would crack the window to let in a sliver of cool air because she always ran toward cold and I always ran toward warmth, and somehow that small negotiation felt like the whole of us, her reaching for the window and me pulling the blanket, both of us finding the exact temperature that let us stay.

We would drape ourselves across my bed and pour everything out onto pages, into laughter, into a conversation that doesn’t need a destination because the being in it was already arrival.

Somewhere between that room and adulthood, I learned to choke it down.

I mean the tears, the softness, my ability to feel in surround sound. The world rarely announces when it starts reshaping you. It presents as a raised eyebrow here, a corrective “stop crying” there. An accumulation of moments that teach you being porous is a liability, that needing is weakness, that the girl sprawled on the pink room carpet was maybe a little too much for the rooms that waited ahead.

So you armor up. You manage. You become extraordinarily competent at carrying things that were never yours to carry, and you mistake that competence for strength for a very long time.

And then, if you’re lucky, if you do the work and build the village and choose the right people with slow and careful precision that only comes from having chosen wrong before, you spend your thirties in the tender and sometimes grueling work of unlearning it all.

My soul sister laughed first, then let me find my way to the words.

“I think adulting,” I told her, somewhere between crying and laughing, the two states bleeding together the way they do when something is both true and overdue, “is literally navigating yourself back to the little girl in the pink room. Before the world told her who to be.”

She didn’t hesitate. “That’s exactly what it is. Except this time, you love her.”

I let those words surround me and settle into my body the way heat does, slowly, from the outside in.

Except this time, you love her.

Because that’s the part becoming leaves out of the brochure. She doesn’t go anywhere, the girl in the pink room, the one who felt everything and wrote it all down and giggled too loud and cried at the sheer beauty of ordinary things. She waits. You circle back and find her exactly where you left her, cross-legged on her bed with a journal in her lap and a pen in her hand and the window cracked just enough to let the cool air in, and this time you pull up a seat beside her instead of asking her to be quieter.

This time you say: “I’ve been looking for you.”

Nine days before I turned 40, I came home to a handwritten poster board and wept on my jewel toned bed.

The Poster board with more puns than I could count/Photo by Author

That day I had been in rooms where my story was reflected back to me by the women around me. Recognition. My husband had observed me, unassumingly and completely, the way only he knows how. Witnessing. My soul sister had held my becoming across three decades without once losing her grip. Follow through. A community that had chosen me back. Chosen. I kept stopping mid-sentence just to breathe it in.

It felt bigger than me. It was.

What you allow yourself to receive is what you eventually have capacity to give. The tears you stop choking down become the words that free someone else. The girl you return to was never too much. She was always just early.

This is 40.

And I love every bitty ounce of it.

Just in case you didn’t know, I launched a second publication this year called The Sister Field a publication honoring divine feminine knowledge and wholeness.