There is a woman I used to be. I am still looking for her.
The rest of it.
I was voted Most Likely to Go to Jail in high school. I have reached the age of comfort over fashion. I live with two cats who tolerate me. I read boring history books for fun. I listen to polkas, waltzes, and classical music without apology. I am still a little crazy. There is room on the path if you are too.
Returning together,
Bonnie
Not the younger one. Not the prettier one.
The one who was here before I learned to be useful. Before I learned to be easy. Before I learned to make myself small enough to fit through whatever door was opening at the time.
I am 64. I have a head full of gray hair and an opinion about most things. I have been a daughter, a sister, a partner, a professional, a good girl, too much, and not enough, sometimes all in the same afternoon. I answered to all of it. For a long time I thought answering to all of it was the same as being myself.
It was not.
The Returning Project is what happened when I stopped pretending it was.
For a long time I thought resilience meant holding.
Holding the job. Holding on to the relationship. Holding the room together when the room did not want to hold itself. I was good at it. I had built an entire career around it. Teaching other people how to stay standing when the ground moved.
What nobody told me, and what I did not figure out until my own ground moved, is that you can hold everything together on the outside and still be quietly coming apart on the inside. Nobody sees it. That is the whole point of holding. You get very good at not showing the weight.
The Returning Project started the day I stopped holding and started listening to what had been trying to get my attention for a very long time.
Returning is not going back.
I want to be clear about this because the word gets misread. Returning is not nostalgia. It is not trying to find the woman I was at 25 or 35 or the one in the old photograph who had not yet learned what she was about to learn. That woman is gone and I am not chasing her.
Returning is coming home to the part of me that was here before any of it. Before the roles. Before the nouns. Before the committee of voices I did not invite and could not get rid of. She was here first. She is still here. She just got quiet while everybody else was talking.
This work is the practice of getting quiet enough to hear her again.
The rest of my life, for context.
I have spent over thirty years in crisis. Not my own, other people's. Hurricanes, floods, pandemics, building collapses, the kinds of days that make the news and the kinds that do not. I run the operational resilience program at Tulane University. I teach emergency management to communities around the country through FEMA and the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center. I hold the MBCP, which is the highest certification in my field.
I am telling you this not to impress you. I am telling you so you know that when I talk about standing in something that feels unstable, I am not speaking theoretically. I have spent my professional life in rooms where the ground was actually moving. What I did not expect was that the hardest ground I would ever have to stand on would be my own.
That is what this project is about.
What this is, and what it is not.
This is a space for women who are quietly compressed. Who have not fallen apart. Who function well enough that no one has thought to ask. Who have been carrying something heavy for a long time without a name for it. If that is you, welcome.
This is not a program. It is not a cure. I am not a guru and I am not standing on the other side of having figured it out. I am still in this. I am writing a book about it while I am still in it, which is either brave or ridiculous and some days I genuinely cannot tell.
What I can promise is this. I will go first. Every time. Whatever I ask you to sit with, I have already sat with. Whatever I ask you to look at, I have already looked at, usually more than once, usually while pretending I was not looking. That is the deal.
You are not alone in here.