The USDA Diaries (1): Applying for a USDA Direct Home Loan

Applying for a USDA Direct Home Loan: What My Experience Was Actually Like

On confusing eligibility results, two days of paperwork, and an approval process that moved much faster than I expected

When I first started seriously thinking about buying a house, I knew I needed to be realistic. I was trying to buy on one income, and although I had spent the last few years paying off debt, rebuilding my credit, and building savings, I still needed a mortgage that would leave room in my monthly budget for everything else that comes with raising two kids and owning a home.

Then I found USDA Direct. And because I am me, I immediately began researching it to death.

USDA's Section 502 Direct Loan Program helps eligible low and very-low-income households buy homes in qualifying rural areas. Unlike a USDA Guaranteed loan, which is made by a private lender and backed by USDA, a USDA Direct loan comes directly through USDA Rural Development.

There were two parts of the program that immediately got my attention. The first was that USDA Direct can offer 100 percent financing, meaning no down payment is required. I had savings, and I had worked hard to build them. Not having to use a large portion of that money for a down payment meant I could keep it available for moving expenses, furniture, household essentials, repairs, and all the other things I would need once I actually owned a house.

But the bigger benefit for me was the program's payment assistance. Eligible Direct borrowers can receive a subsidy that reduces the amount they are required to pay each month. For someone trying to make homeownership work on one income, that was huge. It wasn't simply about qualifying for a mortgage. It was about having a monthly mortgage payment I could realistically live with after I bought the house.

Naturally, a government program capable of doing all of that comes with rules. Income limits. Property eligibility. Credit requirements. Debt-to-income calculations. Property standards. Maximum loan amounts. And, as I would later discover, property taxes can completely rearrange the number you thought you were approved for. But first, I had to figure out whether I qualified at all.

The Eligibility Tool Said... Probably Not

On July 6, 2026, I contacted USDA Rural Development about the Section 502 Direct program. They then emailed me preliminary information and encouraged me to complete USDA's Single Family Housing Direct Eligibility Assessment before applying.

So I did. The result was not especially encouraging. Based on the information I entered, the assessment said it did not appear that I qualified.

That could very easily have been the point where I stopped. Instead, I sent USDA the assessment results, along with my consumer credit reports, and asked them to review everything. The next morning, July 7, a loan specialist named Jennifer emailed me and asked to do a brief pre-qualification call.

The call took about ten minutes. After going through my actual financial information with me, she told me everything looked fine and that I should qualify.

That became my first useful lesson about USDA Direct: the online eligibility assessment is a screening tool, not necessarily the final answer. In my case, the online result suggested no. An actual USDA loan specialist looked more closely and said yes. Had I simply closed the browser window after the assessment, this entire story might have ended there.

My Credit Was Good. My Credit History Was Not Perfect.

When I sent my information to USDA, I also sent my credit reports. My score at the time was 759, but the reports still reflected some ugly history from 2024.

That had been a difficult financial year. During my divorce and the transition to supporting my household on a single income, I had late payments and settled several accounts. By 2026, those issues were behind me, but they were still sitting there on the reports, so I addressed them before anyone asked.

I included a written explanation describing what had happened and what had changed since then. By that point, I had re-established a consistent payment history, paid off my revolving credit-card debt, built savings, and raised my score substantially. I did not have a perfect credit history. I had a rebuilt one.

To be clear, USDA Direct does not require a specific minimum credit score to qualify for the program. Applicants with lower scores or no traditional score can still be considered. USDA will just do a detailed review of their credit history. For those with higher scores, USDA Direct uses what it calls a streamlined credit analysis for certain applicants who meet its credit-score and other credit-history criteria. My credit profile qualified for that streamlined review, which meant USDA did not have to dig as deeply into my credit history or put me through the more detailed credit analysis used for other applicants. In practical terms, my 759 helped simplify and speed up the review, and the negative history from 2024 had much less impact than I had feared. 

After spending several years watching my credit score and trying to repair the financial damage from a hard period of my life, there was something deeply satisfying about reaching a point where my credit was finally helping instead of hurting.

Then Came the Actual Application

After our pre-qualification conversation, Jennifer sent me the full application package on July 8. Some USDA Direct applicants use a loan application packager to help put everything together. I did not.

I spent about two days gathering documents, filling out forms, checking everything, and assembling what felt like a small autobiography written entirely in financial records: income documents, bank information, debts, assets, identification, tax documents, and supporting paperwork. It was a lot, but I got through it.

On July 8, I emailed the completed application and supporting documents back to USDA. And then nothing happened, because, as it turned out, USDA never received it.

My Application Disappeared

Six days later, on July 14, Jennifer emailed me. She had been out of the office and apologized for the delay, but more importantly, she told me my name was not on their applicant list and it did not appear my application had been received.

My enormous email full of financial documents had apparently vanished somewhere between my sent folder and the federal government. Jennifer suggested the attachments may simply have been too large and recommended splitting everything into multiple messages.

So on July 14, I resent the entire application in three separate emails and specifically asked them to confirm that they had received it. This time, they did.

And this is where the timeline gets a little ridiculous... in a good way.

They Processed It in One Day: July 15

USDA received my application on July 14. On July 15, a loan technician was already processing it.

One day. After spending two days carefully assembling the application myself, I was fully prepared for him to discover that I had forgotten twelve things and signed three forms incorrectly. Instead, his email began: “Great job with the documents.”

I may have enjoyed that sentence more than a normal person should.

He needed one additional signature. I signed the page and sent it back, and later that same day he emailed me again to say that he had already sent my application for approval. From there, it moved to the USDA specialist who would complete the review, approve it (or not), and ultimately issue my Certificate of Eligibility. The COE is, essentially, USDA's version of a a mortgage preapproval, and this would be the final step.

So to be very clear about how fast this happened: USDA received my application July 14. The technician processed it July 15 and sent it for approval that same day. One day after they actually had my application, the initial processing was finished.

After everything I had read about USDA Direct before applying, I was genuinely stunned.

I Had Expected This to Take Forever

Before I applied, I had read plenty of USDA Direct stories online: waiting lists, funding shortages, applications sitting for months, and people in some parts of the country describing extraordinarily long waits before they could move forward. I had prepared myself for government bureaucracy. I had not prepared myself for efficiency.

From my very first contact with USDA on July 6 to my Certificate of Eligibility took eleven days. But even that makes the process sound slower than it actually was. The completed application USDA could actually open and process was received July 14. It was processed July 15. And on July 17, I had my Certificate of Eligibility.

Three days from received application to certificate. One day for the initial processing.

I Was Approved: July 17

On July 17, I heard from Samantha, the USDA specialist who would become my point person as I started looking at houses. I was approved.

My Certificate of Eligibility showed a maximum loan amount of $262,740, based on the estimated property taxes and homeowners insurance USDA had used in the calculation. I stared at that number for a while.

$262,740. I could buy a house.

And just as important to me, the program was structured to make the monthly payment more manageable. The payment assistance was the piece that had made USDA Direct feel different from the other mortgage options I had looked at. A loan approval by itself would not have helped much if the resulting payment swallowed so much of my income that I could barely afford to live in the house afterward.

The subsidy meant that qualifying for a house and being able to afford the monthly payment were not necessarily the same thing. USDA could reduce the payment based on my income, making homeownership more affordable on one salary. For me, that was one of the biggest reasons the program worked at all.

Eleven days earlier, I had sent an email asking USDA whether this program might work for me. The online assessment suggested it probably would not. A loan specialist told me it should. I completed the application myself. The first email disappeared. I sent it again. USDA processed it in one day. Three days after they actually received it, I had a certificate telling me I could go buy a house.

That was not the experience I had prepared myself for.

My Experience Is Not a Timeline Guarantee

This is the part I want to be very careful about: I am not telling anyone that USDA Direct applications take three days. Mine did. That does not mean yours will.

Processing can vary depending on location, staffing, funding availability, demand, the complexity of an applicant's finances, whether the application is complete, and other circumstances. I was fortunate. I submitted a very complete package, my credit qualified for a streamlined review, and my USDA office was apparently able to begin processing my file immediately.

Someone else's experience may look completely different. But I also think it is worth sharing the fast stories alongside the slow ones. Before I applied, I had found so many accounts of people waiting that I almost assumed the process would be miserable before I had even started.

Mine wasn't. It was paperwork-heavy. It was confusing in places. My first application email literally disappeared. But once USDA actually received it, they processed it in a day. And two days later, I was approved.

Then I Learned That $262,740 Did Not Really Mean $262,740

Of course, I was still very new to USDA Direct. So when I saw $262,740 on my certificate, I assumed that meant I could open Zillow, set my maximum price to $262,740, and go shopping.

Reasonable assumption. Incorrect assumption.

The amount USDA would actually allow me to borrow for an individual property depended heavily on that property's taxes and insurance. Two houses with the exact same sale price could produce very different USDA calculations.

And in New York, where property taxes enjoy ruining everyone's day, that became a fairly important detail.

Eventually, I had a spreadsheet. Obviously.

But that is the next part of the story.

I'm documenting my personal experience with the USDA Section 502 Direct Loan Program in New York in 2026. This is not financial, lending, or legal advice. Program rules, income limits, funding availability, payment assistance, processing times, and individual circumstances can change. Always verify current requirements directly with USDA Rural Development.

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While It Was Still Magic

On childhood, wonder, and the questions that change everything

For the last couple of weeks, Caleb has been asking Alexa if Santa is real.

Not once.

Repeatedly.

He says he is trying to figure it out.

This is, of course, an extremely Caleb way to approach the situation. He is eleven years old, one of the smartest people I know, and apparently childhood magic has now become a research project.

Alexa has not been particularly helpful.

“Well, someone has been eating all my cookies,” she says.

Caleb remains unconvinced... and unamused.

There is something funny about watching an eleven-year-old interrogate a smart speaker about Santa Claus. There is also something about it that makes my chest hurt a little.

Holden lost another tooth last week.

He told me he did not think the Tooth Fairy was real.

That one got me too.

Not because I desperately want them to keep believing forever. I know how this works. They are supposed to grow up. They are supposed to question things. Eventually Santa becomes a story, the Tooth Fairy becomes a family tradition everyone understands, and Christmas morning becomes exciting for different reasons.

That is all normal.

Still.

I remember when none of it required investigation. There were Santa dinners. There were letters. And there was magic.

Years ago, Caleb lost a tooth while we were out on a walk and could not find it. So he wrote the Tooth Fairy a note explaining the situation. There was no suspicion involved. No attempt to gather evidence. He had lost the tooth. The Tooth Fairy needed to know why it would not be under his pillow. Obviously, documentation was required.

There was a time when Caleb believed in Santa without wondering. A time when a lost tooth still required a carefully written explanation to the Tooth Fairy. A time when magic did not need evidence because believing was enough.

I do not know exactly when that started to change.

I only know that now Caleb is asking Alexa for answers, and Holden is beginning to question the fairy who once needed no explanation at all.

I do not want to go back and start childhood over. I like who they are now. I like eleven-year-old Caleb, with his questions and his sharp mind and his need to understand how things work. I like eight-year-old Holden, funny and loud and increasingly skeptical in his own way.

There are wonderful things about these ages. They can do more for themselves. We can have better conversations. They have stronger opinions, stranger jokes, bigger interests, and whole parts of themselves that exist outside of me. I love watching that happen.

That is what makes this ache a little harder to explain. Because I am not mourning who they are now.

I am mourning something that used to exist around them.

The certainty. The anticipation. The absolute willingness to believe in something simply because childhood had told them it was true.

There is something bittersweet about watching wonder turn into understanding.

They gain the answer.

They lose the magic.

And I know that is part of growing up, too. There is no tragedy in an eleven-year-old questioning Santa. There is no crisis in an eight-year-old deciding the Tooth Fairy probably is not real. If anything, it is evidence that they are learning how the world works.

But sometimes I miss the years when the world worked a little differently.

The years when a letter could solve the problem of a missing tooth. The years when Santa dinners felt enormous. The years when Christmas Eve carried a kind of electricity that had nothing to do with batteries, shipping notifications, or figuring anything out.

The years when magic did not need defending. 

It was simply there.

Maybe that is what I miss most.

Not the diapers, not the bottles, not the exhausting parts of having very little children. I do not want to start over. 

I just miss that particular kind of wonder.

The kind that belongs so completely to childhood that you do not realize how rare it is until you are watching it begin to fade.

And once you notice it beginning to leave, it is hard not to look back at all the moments it still came so easily.

The years when they stared out the window, searching the sky for Santa. The nights when they scattered reindeer food out in the snow, completely certain it would be found. The mornings Holden woke up and could have sworn he heard Santa, up there on the roof. The days nobody stopped to wonder whether any of it was true.

It just was. 

Looking back now, I can see how extraordinary all of it had been.

For a while, they didn't have to choose to believe in magic.

They simply lived inside out.

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All We Did Was Laugh

On eighth birthdays, terrible weather, and the shape of a family

A couple of weeks ago, Holden turned eight.

By the time I got home from work that afternoon, the sky was already darkening. The forecast was terrible. Heavy rain. Thunderstorms. At some point, there were even tornado warnings, which felt a little excessive for a child’s birthday.

But we had plans.

So the three of us went to the trampoline park, where Holden spent part of his eighth birthday launching himself into foam pits and doing whatever else eight-year-old boys do when given access to a building specifically designed for bouncing off things.

Afterward, we went to McDonald’s, per his request, for his birthday dinner.

There was nothing particularly remarkable about it. Holden ate chicken nuggets. I took his picture, and then he immediately asked me to take another one because he wanted to smile better. He always wants to see the picture after I take one of him, inspecting it before deciding whether I’m allowed to keep it. This time, it needed a redo. 

Once the second picture passed inspection, we all went back to our nuggets.

Outside, the sky kept lighting up. Every time it did, Holden looked toward the windows in surprise.

“Did you see that?!”

Yes. Every time.

At some point during dinner, my realtor called, so I stepped away to talk to him. Then I came back, we finished eating, and shortly after seven, it was time to head home.

By then, the weather we had been watching through the windows had arrived in full.

It was pitch black outside, and the rain was coming down in absolute buckets. Not normal rain. The kind where you stand inside the door for a second staring at the parking lot, hoping perhaps the laws of weather will change if you wait long enough.

They did not.

Eventually, we had to make a run for it.

I hate being wet. I hate wet clothes sticking to me. I especially hate wet hair hanging down my back. Under ordinary circumstances, getting caught in a downpour is less an adventure and more a personal grievance.

But there was no avoiding this one.

So we ran.

Across the McDonald’s parking lot, through rain that soaked us almost instantly, the three of us sprinted toward the car. By the time we got there, we looked like we had taken showers fully dressed. My hair was plastered against me. Our clothes were dripping. The boys were soaked.

And all we did was laugh.

We laughed while we ran. We laughed when we climbed into the car and saw how ridiculous we looked. We laughed because there was really nothing else to do.

The drive home was slow and difficult through the rain, and when we finally made it back, we had to make another run from the car to the house. Then all three of us immediately changed out of our drenched clothes. It even required towels.

That was Holden’s eighth birthday.

A trampoline park. Chicken nuggets. A picture he made me retake. Lightning outside the McDonald’s windows. A realtor call. And three people running through a parking lot in a torrential downpour.

It wasn’t the birthday itself that stayed with me, though. It was that run to the car.

For the last few years, I think I had been carrying around an idea I never really said out loud: that the three of us were merely what was left of a family. Not broken, exactly, but somehow incomplete. Like we were the smaller version, the part that remained after the original shape of our life changed.

I was building something new for us, but I’m not sure I had fully stopped measuring it against what came before. Somewhere in my head, "whole" still belonged to that old version of our family.

The last few years have felt like one long storm. Divorce. Starting over. Trying to build a life for the three of us while so much still felt unsettled.

And now, somehow, I was buying us a home. There was finally something on the other side of all that weather.

The storm had not disappeared. That night, it was literally pouring down around us.

But the three of us were running through it together, completely drenched, laughing so hard we could barely make it to the car.

For once, we did not feel like the pieces of a family that had survived. We just felt like a family.

And for the first time in a long time, I understood that "whole" did not mean untouched by the storm.

It meant the three of us were still here, laughing in it.

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The Indian Prince (Modern Courtship)

On online dating, local restaurants, and an unexpectedly convincing scam

September 2026 · Somewhere between Batavia Downs and an international fraud operation

MODERN COURTSHIP · THE SERIES

True stories from dating apps, awkward encounters, and the absurdities of modern dating.

I talked to a guy on Facebook Dating for two entire days.

Not two messages.

Two days.

Eventually, he would decide I was a scammer. But first, we talked about normal things. Work. Dating. Restaurants. Local places. At one point, we were discussing whether Batavia Downs had an Italian restaurant, which feels like pretty compelling evidence that I was, in fact, a real woman in Western New York and not a man operating a romance scam from another continent.

Soon enough, we made plans to meet. He looked up the restaurant and said it seemed formal. I told him that sounded good to me, but we could go somewhere else if that wasn’t his thing.

“Not usually but fuck it let’s do it.”

Perfect. We had a plan.

Four minutes later, he apparently had a crisis of faith.

“Wait are you real or am I talking to some fat dude in his moms basement”

I stared at my phone. There are several reasonable responses to this question. I chose none of them.

“I’m not real.😞”

He replied, “Well this was fun.” 

Obviously, I had to continue. “It was! And I am an Indian prince requesting you send me some money via email.”

“Of course i will.”

Excellent. He understood the joke.

Or so I thought.

He asked how a prince had gotten stuck with the texting job. I told him I would have to think about it and get back to him in three to four business days.

“Please I’m genuinely interested.”

At this point, we were fully committed to the bit. I explained that I needed to research it because I wasn’t sure why a royal would have to resort to internet scams, although apparently it was very common.

And then the conversation ended.

Not naturally. Not with a goodnight. Not even with an increasingly suspicious request for his Social Security number.

A few minutes later, I went back to confirm dinner. His profile was gone. He had unmatched me.

After two days of talking. After discussing actual local restaurants. After making actual plans. After he asked whether I was secretly a fake person and then actively participated in the joke about me being an Indian prince.

Apparently, somewhere in those final few messages, he reconsidered the available evidence and thought:

You know what? She might actually be an Indian prince.

So he did the only logical thing: he blocked me.

Which is how I learned that I am apparently a very convincing Indian prince.

Actual screenshots

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Something New (New Chapters, Ch. 3)

New Chapters ◦ Chapter Three: The Return ◦ Entry 5

This essay is part of my New Chapters series — a collection of personal essays organized into themed chapters that trace different seasons of rebuilding and becoming.

← Previous: One More Life

On starting over, building home, and creating a life from scratch 🌿

July and August had been a whirlwind. 

In the early days of July, buying a house was still something I was trying to figure out whether I could even do. A week in, I applied for a USDA Direct home loan, got approved much faster than I expected, and suddenly... the thing I had been working toward for years became real. 

We went into house-hunting mode almost immediately. I studied listings and property taxes. We drove through towns in five counties. We walked through houses and imagined our furniture in them. I made offers. I lost houses I had already started picturing as ours. And every time, we regrouped and kept looking. Somewhere in those crazy few weeks, "maybe someday" had turned into we are actually doing this. We just needed to find the house first.

By the last week of August, the boys and I were still looking. I was worn down. I was growing discouraged. It felt like we'd never find our home. Then, on a Wednesday night in LeRoy, we walked through another house. This one felt different. It felt immediately familiar. 

By the next day, Thursday, August 27, we had made an offer, and the whirlwind of the previous two months had suddenly narrowed to one thing: waiting to find out whether this house was going to be ours.

Finally, the listing agent contacted my realtor Mike in the afternoon with an update of sorts. At first, there was a concern about my USDA home loan. She had dealt with USDA financing before and had concerns about their tough inspection process. Mike went to bat for us. He explained the process, told her about his colleagues and their recent successes with USDA, and answered her questions. And then we waited some more.

For a little while, I thought that was the thing standing between me and the house.

But then the concern changed. The realtor called Mike again that evening and explained that the house was part of an estate. One of the daughters was the executor. It had belonged to their mother for decades, and she had raised six children there. The family was having a hard time letting it go.

There was nothing I could do about that.

I understood it, which somehow made the waiting worse. Somewhere, a family was deciding whether they were ready to say goodbye to a house that had held decades of their life. And on the other side of that decision, I was desperately hoping they would let it hold the next part of mine.

They told us we would have an answer by noon Friday.

So I waited. All day Thursday. All Thursday night. I worried about the financing. I worried that the family would decide they weren’t ready. I worried that I had let myself want this one too much.

Then Friday morning, I went to work and acted completely normal. I answered emails. I did whatever was sitting on my desk. I set up a meeting. Then I went to the meeting and sat there like a person whose stomach was not churning while somewhere else, people I had never met were deciding whether I was about to buy a house.

I knew we were supposed to hear by noon. I was aware of every passing minute.

Then my phone lit up.

Mike.

Pls call me when free - good news.

I looked at those words and knew. I excused myself from the meeting and walked out. I called Mike.

They had accepted my offer.

I got the house.

And then, somehow, I had to go back to work.

Later that afternoon, I sat through two hours of training on travel reports. Someone was explaining mileage and reimbursements and forms I was presumably supposed to be learning how to complete, while my mind kept wandering somewhere else.

The kitchen. The bedrooms upstairs. The backyard. The deck.

We got it.

Then I would drag my attention back to travel reports. A few minutes later, my mind was there again.

It has been a couple of weeks now, and everything still feels surreal.

Most of the time, my life looks exactly the same as it did before. I wake up in the same room. I drive to the same job. I come home to my parents’ house. I order groceries. I spend time with the boys. I go to bed. Nothing around me has changed yet.

And then, in the middle of some completely ordinary part of my day, the house pops into my head: Oh! I bought a house.

It feels almost like remembering something I had temporarily forgotten, and every single time, I feel this little burst of happiness inside.

We have a house. That house is ours.

I keep looking at the pictures. I have seen them so many times that I practically have the listing memorized, but I still pull them up. Except now I am not studying them the way I did when I was house hunting. I am not trying to decide whether I like the kitchen or whether the bedrooms are big enough or whether I can picture us living there.

I already know the answer.

Now I look at them and think, That’s ours.

That kitchen is ours. Those stairs are ours. Those bedrooms are going to belong to my boys.

I have started mocking up rooms, changing flooring and furniture and paint colors on my phone just to see what everything might look like. I have looked at dining room tables and couches and sideboards. I have thought about where the television should go and what furniture will fit in which room. I have mentally pulled up carpet I do not yet own. I am decorating a house I cannot currently enter, which is a very strange way to live.

And then there are the things that are considerably less exciting than furniture.

A few days after we got the news, I made a checklist of everything I am going to need when we move. I am starting almost completely from scratch, and it turns out a functioning household requires an alarming number of things. Plates. Towels. Scissors. Cleaning supplies. An air fryer. Trash cans. Shower curtains. All the tiny things that exist quietly in a home until you suddenly realize you do not own any of them.

I decided I would start buying a few things every week rather than trying to buy an entire household at once.

The first week of September, I placed a Walmart order. Just a regular Walmart order. Nothing exciting. Before I checked out, I looked at my house checklist and added three things: Paper towels. Ziploc bags. Aluminum foil.

That was it.

The first three things I bought for home.

Not a couch. Not a dining room table. Not even a plate. Paper towels, Ziploc bags, and foil.

And somehow, even that made me happy.

Because they aren’t for where I live now. They’re for my house. For my kitchen. For cupboards I cannot open yet and a life we are waiting to move into.

I keep having moments like that lately, when the enormity of what is happening sneaks into something completely ordinary.

Maybe that is why it all still feels so surreal.

For years, buying a house was something that belonged to a future version of my life. First I needed to get through the divorce. I needed to figure out where we were going to live in the immediate future. I needed to find steady ground again. I needed to pay off debt. I needed to save money. I needed to rebuild my credit. I needed a job that could support us. I needed to get approved for a mortgage. I needed to find a house I could actually afford.

There was always another thing between me and home.

And now that I am almost there, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. It is going to be hard financially. I know that. There will be months when the mortgage and the utilities and groceries and whatever old-house surprise has decided to introduce itself make me wonder what on earth I was thinking.

I know what it means to do this on one income. I know I am taking on something enormous.

I am scared.

And I did it anyway.

Not because I stopped being afraid, but because somewhere along the way, I became capable of doing the thing that scared me.

Soon, my boys are going to live in a house their mother bought for the three of us. I can barely type that sentence without crying.

Their bedrooms. Their backyard. Their stairs. Their home.

A home I bought.

But that life is still just ahead of us. Right now, I am still here. In between. Looking at pictures. Mocking up rooms. Searching for furniture. Buying paper towels. Slowly gathering the pieces of a life we are preparing to move into.

Maybe it is because I am standing so close to the beginning of that life that I can finally see the last few years a little differently.

For three years, I have called all of this rebuilding.

Rebuilding my finances. Rebuilding my career. Rebuilding our routines. Rebuilding my life after the one I thought I was going to have ended.

But lately, I have started to wonder if I have been using the wrong word.

Because rebuilding suggests putting something back together. Restoring what was there before.

And that isn’t what I have done.

I am not recreating my old life. This house will not look like the house we lived in before. Our family will not look the way it did before. There will not be another adult income helping with the mortgage or another person responsible when something breaks.

The more I look at the life in front of me, the less it resembles anything I had before.

For three years, I thought I was rebuilding the life I had lost.

I wasn’t.

Turns out, I was building something new.

Next: Coming Soon →

  

Visit the New Chapters landing page to explore each chapter and read the story in order.

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The Habit of Holding On

On higher standards, quiet phones, and learning to let go 

Lately, it feels like my phone has gotten quiet.

I keep noticing it. Not because I am waiting for one particular person. I am not.

I think I am waiting for proof. Proof that somebody misses me. That somebody is thinking about me. That somewhere, someone has looked at the absence I left behind and thought, I really lost something there.

I wish somebody cared that they lost me.

It is not an especially comfortable thing to admit.

There have been several endings lately. Some mattered more than others. Some involved love. Some never had enough time to become love. Some were relationships I stayed in for years. Others were possibilities I held onto because I wanted to see what they might become.

Different people. Different circumstances. But I have been noticing something they all have in common.

Me.

More specifically, the way I have behaved when I wanted something to work.

I stay. I accommodate. I explain. I forgive. I reconsider. I convince myself I can live with things that make me uncomfortable. I tell myself nobody is perfect. I tell myself relationships require compromise. I tell myself I am being understanding.

Sometimes I have been understanding.

Sometimes I have just been abandoning myself very quietly.

For years, I confused my ability to endure something with evidence that it was worth enduring. I could tolerate it, so I did.

I stayed in situations that made me uncomfortable because I loved the person in them. I told myself I could handle complicated dynamics. I could be flexible. I could be patient. I could ask for less.

So I did.

I made my needs smaller because sometimes it felt easier than risking the relationship altogether. I convinced myself that if I were understanding enough, patient enough, accommodating enough, eventually I would feel secure.

Sometimes I stayed for years.

Other times, I stayed emotionally invested in something much shorter because the beginning had felt so intense that I kept waiting for that version of it to come back. I kept trying. Kept reaching. Kept hoping there was still something there to save, even when I was getting very little in return.

I have spent a lot of time hanging on after there was barely anything left to hang on to.

And even when I finally left, leaving was rarely the end.

I thought about going back. A lot. 

Sometimes I did.

I have reopened doors I had already closed. Reconsidered decisions I had already made. Missed someone so badly that I began rewriting the reasons I had left in the first place.

Distance has a funny way of softening the parts that hurt. You remember the affection. The inside jokes. The familiar voice. The person you reached for automatically. You do not always remember, with quite the same clarity, how lonely you felt while they were still there.

I am trying to learn the difference.

Missing someone does not necessarily mean I made the wrong decision. 

Loving someone does not necessarily mean I should be with them. 

And wanting something to work does not mean I can make it work by wanting harder.

That last one has probably been the hardest. I love deeply. When I am in, I am very in. I am loyal. Devoted. Affectionate. I pay attention. I try to understand the person I love. I want to make their life easier. I want them to feel cared for.

Those are qualities I like about myself.

But I am beginning to understand that they can become dangerous when I offer all of them to someone who is giving very little back. Devotion can turn into over-functioning. Patience can become permission. Understanding can become an excuse I make on someone else’s behalf. And loyalty, without reciprocity, can keep me somewhere long after I should have left.

I have done that. More than once.

But lately, something has started changing.

I have walked away from things that hurt. And more recently, I walked away from something before it had the chance to hurt me in the same way.

There was no giant betrayal required. No dramatic final offense. No moment that would make everyone immediately agree that leaving was the obvious choice. There was simply a situation I looked at and thought, I know myself well enough to know this will make me unhappy.

And instead of waiting until I was deeply attached, resentful, or years into trying to convince myself I could live with it, I left.

That was enough.

I am not sure it would have been enough for me before.

I used to think I needed a very good reason to leave someone. Now I am learning that something being wrong for me is a good reason. Something making me consistently uncomfortable is a good reason. Something requiring me to ignore my own needs is a good reason.

And sometimes, simply wanting something different is a good reason.

This sounds empowering when I write it down. In reality, it has been lonely as hell.

Nobody tells you that raising your standards can make your life lonelier before it makes it better.

There is no immediate prize for deciding you deserve more. Sometimes there is just an empty space where a person used to be. Sometimes there is a quiet phone. Sometimes there is the temptation to reopen a door simply because you hate the silence on your side of it.

That is the part I am learning to live with now.

Not every empty space needs to be filled by the person who used to occupy it. Not every silence means I should reach backward. Not every ache is an instruction.

Sometimes I miss people I should not be with. Sometimes I still love people I should not be with. Both things can be true.

And sometimes I miss people I never loved at all. I miss the possibility. The excitement. The chemistry. The version of the future that existed briefly in my head.

That does not mean I need those people back either.

I think what I am really longing for is something I have not quite had yet.

Someone who loves me the way I love.

Not identically. People show love differently. But with the same seriousness.

Someone who does not need to be convinced that I am worth showing up for. Someone who cares when something hurts me because it hurts me, not because I have finally reached my breaking point. Someone who does not suddenly discover my value once I am halfway out the door.

Someone who cares about losing me.

I have spent enough time wondering whether someone will come back after I leave. For a long time, I thought that was the proof that I mattered: the text someone finally sent. The apology. The realization. Someone deciding, after I was gone, that losing me had been a mistake.

I do not want to wait for that proof anymore.

I do not want to spend my life hoping someone realizes what he lost after I am gone. I want someone who cares about losing me while he still has the chance not to.

Until then, I am trying to believe that the quiet is not emptiness. It is space I stopped giving to the wrong people.

I am not all the way there yet. I still look back. I still miss people. I still question myself. But looking back does not have to mean going back.

I can miss what was good and still admit that something was not enough. I can care deeply and still decide I need more than I am being given.

Maybe that is what is changing: I am learning to believe that wanting more is not asking too much. Maybe it is finally asking enough.

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