Kate Didd

(Day 27)

I woke up later than usual this morning, like the night had carried me off in a storm and only just set me back down. My body had finally called it enough. Ten days of running on fumes caught up all at once. It wasn’t graceful. It was a collapse. The kind that feels like holding your breath for far too long and realizing, all at once, you’re allowed to exhale.

Yesterday, we chose differently.

The kids were restless, wild in that way children get when they feel the subtle shift in their parents. Distraction. Distance. The quiet unraveling that adults think they’re hiding but kids always seem to sense. They didn’t need perfection. They needed us. But we were tired, bone-deep tired, so we met them in the middle.

The adventure became a movie.

Sticky floors, oversized screens, little cardboard boxes of candy, individual popcorns, slushies glowing in artificial colors. They were mesmerized. Completely gone into that world. And for the first time in my life, I paid for a nap and felt no guilt about it. My body needed it more than my pride needed to stay awake.

They were happy.
We were there.
That counted.

Parenting isn’t something we were taught how to do, it’s something we’re actively surviving while trying to do better than what we came from. It’s love tangled with accountability, exhaustion wrapped in intention. And sometimes, showing up looks like sitting in the dark while your kids laugh at a screen and you finally let yourself rest.

That was the reset.

Because today we lock in.

What most people don’t know is that my husband and I have already proven what we can do together. We ran a restaurant side by side. Not just surviving it, owning it. The kind of rhythm people chase their entire lives. Communication sharp. Energy aligned. Staff thriving. It was seamless, like something bigger than us had taken over and said, this is what happens when you get it right.

We were magic.

And then life did what it does, it split us apart again. Not in love, but in direction. In timing. In growth that couldn’t quite sync. I tried to pull us back into alignment before everything burned, before the ships went up in flames like they always seem to in my life. But he couldn’t see me then. Not fully.

So I moved.

Not gently. Not cautiously.

Aggressively.

Because it was movement or death and for the first time in my life, I was afraid to die. Not physically. Existentially. Spiritually. I couldn’t go back to being small. To playing safe. To handling my life with kid gloves just to avoid losing pieces.

That’s when I understood the game.

You will lose pieces.

And not all of them matter.

I spent so long trying to protect everything, every person, every version of myself, every situation I’d built. But the truth is, not everything is meant to move forward with you. Some things exist only to teach you how to play.

Pawns get taken.

And sometimes, you realize they were never your strongest pieces to begin with.

What matters is the back line. The foundation. The things you refuse to lose: your core, your values, your vision, your ability to stand in your own truth even when it costs you everything else.

That’s the part you defend.

Now I’m standing at the end of a game I started a year ago. I can feel it closing in, the checkmate moment. The quiet before everything shifts. And I look around the board one last time.

At the people who are no longer here.
At the places I walked away from.
At the jobs, the identities, the comfort zones I shed like old skin.

I take it in, not with regret, but with recognition.

That game is over.

And for the first time, I’m not scrambling to keep playing it. I’m not trying to fix it or revive it or pretend it still fits.

I’m waiting to cash out.

To set a new board.

To play something I’ve never played before.

Because here’s the truth, I haven’t been playing aggressively my whole life. I’ve been attacked aggressively. There’s a difference. Survival taught me how to endure, how to adapt, how to keep standing when logic said I shouldn’t be able to.

And for a long time, I laughed it off.

Like, of course I survived that too.

It became a joke. A badge. A strange kind of invincibility built on repeated impact.

But survival isn’t the same as living.

And cycles? They don’t break just because you’ve endured them. They break when you recognize them and choose differently.

Some of mine go back decades. Patterns I carried from childhood into adulthood without realizing I was still playing by rules I never agreed to. In 2010, when I had my daughter, something in me shifted. I knew I couldn’t raise her inside the same framework that raised me.

But knowing and doing are different things.

I would start strong, then fall back. Try again, then abandon it. Repeat. Over and over. Learning the same lesson in slightly different disguises, wondering why it kept showing up like a bill I refused to pay.

Until now.

Because now, I see it.

Not just the mistakes but the system underneath them.

And instead of shaming myself for how many times I got it wrong, I’m honoring the fact that I kept coming back to the lesson until I was finally ready to learn it.

That’s the part we don’t talk about enough.

Growth isn’t clean. It’s repetitive. It’s frustrating. It’s looking at your own life and saying, really? Again? and then having the courage to answer, okay but this time, we do it differently.

That adaptability, the one I built through survival, is finally becoming something else.

Strategy.

Intention.

Choice.

I’m not just reacting anymore. I’m playing.

And this time, I’m not playing to survive.

I’m playing to win a life that actually feels like mine.

One where my inner child isn’t ignored but invited.
One where every version of me, the broken, the healing, the relentless, the hopeful, is respected for getting me here. One where freedom isn’t something I chase but something I build, piece by piece, move by move.

The board is resetting.

And I’m no longer afraid of the game.