the woman you were was never meant to be permanent

a letter for the woman becoming...

There was a version of me that woke up every morning in a truck.

Not metaphorically.

Literally — a truck, parked somewhere in the mountains, windows fogged from the cold, the sound of a campground, a national forest or remote parking spot outside and a sky so wide it almost hurt to look at it.

I was working. I was surviving. I was good at both of those things in the way that women who have been through hard things get very, very good at surviving — quietly, efficiently, without making a fuss about it.

I thought that was strength.

I didn’t know yet that endurance and living in peace are not the same thing.

I didn’t know that the life I was white-knuckling my way through wasn’t the life I was meant for.

I thought wanting more was ungrateful. I thought leaving was weakness. I thought the woman I had become in the hard years — capable, self-sufficient, small…was the woman I was supposed to stay.

I was wrong.

And if you’re reading this, I think some part of you already knows you are too.

There is a particular kind of grief that nobody talks about — the grief of leaving a version of yourself behind.

Not the grief of loss, exactly. But something quieter and stranger than that. The feeling of standing in a doorway between who you were and who you are becoming, not fully in either place, wondering if you’re allowed to walk through.

You are.

That is what I want to say to you today. Before the poem, before anything else…

You are allowed to walk through whatever that door or barrier or blockade is.

You are allowed to want the life that lives on the other side of everything you’ve survived.

You are allowed to be done with just getting through it.

You are allowed to put down the version of yourself that was built for hard seasons and pick up the one that was made for something softer, something bigger, something that actually looks like you.

somewhere between the mountains and the woman I was becoming, I stopped asking permission and started just going.

I left behind the pain. The smallness. The way I had learned to need very little so that losing things wouldn’t hurt so much.

I left her there — that woman. I left her gently. With gratitude. With love.

and I walked toward the one who had been waiting on the other side of the door I was too afraid to open.

she looked like me. but lighter. but more.

SO...

Here is what I have learned about stepping into a new chapter…really stepping into it, not just talking about it:

It doesn’t feel like a beginning at first.

It feels like a loss.

You will grieve the old version of yourself even when she was making you miserable.

Even when she was keeping you small.

Even when you know, in the clearest part of you, that leaving was right.

But here’s the thing, grief doesn’t require regret.

You can be completely certain you made the right choice and still feel the weight of the woman you left behind.

Let yourself feel it. That grief is not a sign you made a mistake. It is a sign that who you were mattered. That you lived fully in that chapter, even when it was hard. You are allowed to honor her on your way out the door.

And then — and this is the part nobody tells you…you have to actively choose the new life.

Over and over again.

Becoming is not a single moment. It is not a decision you make once and then coast.

It is a thousand small choices, day after day, to keep walking toward the woman you are becoming even when she feels unfamiliar.

Even when the new life feels too big.

Even when some voice in you asks who do you think you are.

You are someone who decided to find out.

And that is enough.

A few things that helped me — and might help you:

Let yourself be a beginner. The new life will ask things of you that the old one never did. You will not be good at all of it immediately. That is not failure. That is the cost of growing into something larger than what you were. Pay it without shame.

Stop waiting to feel ready. Ready is a myth. Ready is what we tell ourselves when what we really mean is safe. The new chapter will not feel safe at first. It will feel like standing in the middle of a field with no map. You go anyway. You build the map as you walk.

Surround yourself with evidence that it’s possible. Find the women who did it. Read their stories. Follow their lives. Let their existence be proof that yours is possible too. You cannot become what you cannot first believe exists. This is, in part, why I am here…why I tell you about the truck and the mountains and Georgetown and the soft life I am building on the other side of all of it. So that you can see it. So that it stops being abstract.

Be more loyal to the woman you’re becoming than the woman you were. This is the hardest one. Because the woman you were is familiar. She kept you alive. She knows how to function in the old world. But she was built for a chapter that is closing. The woman you’re becoming needs your loyalty now — your choices, your time, your faith that she is worth building.

She is.

I don’t know what your mountains look like.

I don’t know what version of yourself you’ve been white-knuckling your way through, or how long you’ve been standing in that doorway, or what it is you’re afraid to lose by walking through it.

But I know this….

You didn’t survive everything you survived to stay small.

You survived to become.

with love, from one dear cowgirl to another,

Adrian

Dear Cowgirl: Letters to Women is available now as a digital download — link in bio. If this letter reached something in you, the book was written for that exact part.