The door I would not open

Hello friend,

Well. That one landed.

I have been writing these letters since 2009, sometimes weekly, sometimes whenever the mood struck, and nothing in all that time has brought a response like last week's. Turns out every single one of you has a purse with something fossilised at the bottom of it. The sticky candy. The receipt from 2019. The ghost.

I had planned to move on this week to the performance bag and the things you have let onto your calendar. The ghosts get another week instead. Too many of you got hit hard by that letter, and it would be poor form to show you what is in the bag and then walk off without giving you anything to do about it.

· · ·

WHERE WE LEFT OFF

So. Mine first.

I ran an eco friendly business from 2009 to 2019. When I closed it, it wrecked me. I felt like a failure, it left debt behind, and in hindsight I could name every decision I would make differently. I had run the whole thing out of my basement and my garage, so when it ended I sold what I could, gave away the rest, and put the promotional material, the awards, the bottles, all of it, into one room downstairs.

Then I shut the door.

I told myself it was gone. I would look at that door and think, this weekend. I will go through it this weekend. Then I would not. I walked 800 km across Spain on the Camino and came home having made a kind of peace with it, not the whole thing, but enough to consider opening it. I still didn't. It took another year, and quitting a job I hated, and deciding to turn the space into an Airbnb before I finally put my hand on the handle.

The smell told me before my eyes did.

Mice. Not a mouse. A full infestation, and it had been living very comfortably down there for a long time. Every box. Every banner. Every award with my name on it. The promotional material I had paid a small fortune to print. The bottles, the labels, ten years of paperwork, every single piece of paper I had ever filed, and all of it, every last item, covered in mouse droppings.

There was no sorting. That is the part I want you to hear. No pile for keeping and no pile for deciding later. No sitting cross legged on the basement floor with a cup of tea going through it properly, the way I had pictured it roughly four hundred times. It went to the curb. All of it. In an afternoon.

And here is what I did not expect.

I thought it would gut me. I had been avoiding that room for years precisely because I was certain opening it would level me.

What I felt was relief. Enormous, slightly embarrassing relief. I was lighter walking back up those stairs than I had been on any day since I closed the business.

The only grief in it was for the years I spent not doing it. Because I could have had that exact feeling much earlier. I could have had it without the mouse poop. I could have done it with my own hands, on my own terms, and instead I stood there while it was decided for me.

The universe, it turns out, has no patience whatsoever for my procrastination.

That is what a ghost does. It does not sit quietly in a corner costing you nothing. It takes the room. And it charges you far more than you can see while you are still paying it.

· · ·

THIS WEEK

You wrote back about the craft projects. The bag at the back of the cupboard, three quarters finished, waiting patiently for the version of you who was going to finish it. The courses you started. The educational materials. The PDFs you printed off in the year you were going to learn origami and sell it at markets.

Some of you have already done beautiful things with them. Books to the street library. Needlepoint passed on to a woman who agreed to send a photo when it is done. That is exactly what keeping the story without keeping the thing looks like.

Then it got harder.

The groups. My goodness, you love a book club. You joined when the kids were small, you got real friendships out of it, and the group itself stopped fitting you somewhere around 2016.

Church. That community raised your kids alongside you. Your morning walking partner is the woman you taught Sunday school with. And the messaging and the leadership have not sat right in years.

Here is the part almost nobody sees while they are still standing inside it. You can keep the women without keeping the room.

The friendship does not belong to the book club. That woman you walk with on Wednesday mornings is not on loan from the church. You met her there. She is yours now. Leaving the group does not mean posting the friendship back through the door on your way out, and I promise you she has thought about leaving too.

It is the same thing I say about the stuff. Keep the story, let go of the object. Keep the woman, let go of the Thursday night meeting you have not actually wanted to attend in years.

And the hardest one by a distance. The friendship you knew needed to end a long time ago. It is toxic. You accept treatment from her you would not accept from anyone else. And she is wrapped inside a whole group of women, so leaving her feels like leaving all of them.

I wrote back to a lot of you about reason, season, lifetime, because that is precisely where the ghost bag sits. When a woman arrives in your life for a reason or a season and you insist on keeping her for a lifetime, you do a disservice to both of you.

We end relationships. We rarely end friendships. A marriage gets a conversation, a decision, sometimes a lawyer. A friendship just gets endured. And you cannot donate her, which is genuinely inconvenient.

So ask the only question that matters here. What is it costing you to stay?

If Tuesday coffee has you turning the conversation over in your head for three days afterward, that is the cost. You are paying in peace.

And the other side of it, because I am not going to pretend this only runs one way. If you are talking about her to anyone who will sit still long enough, have a look at what kind of friend you are being. I never said this work was flattering. We are always the last to see the part we are playing.

· · ·

The ghost bag is the hardest bag because it is not really full of things. It is full of versions of you. Who you were. Who you meant to be. Who you were part way through being when life took a different turn.

Midlife does this. It moves you. And not everyone and not everything that travelled this far with you can come the rest of the way.

Ask anyone who has got sober. The hardest part is never the rehab. It is going home. Same town, same kitchen, same people still doing the thing you have put down.

Which is where the serenity prayer comes in, and yes, I know you have read it on a fridge magnet. Stay with me anyway. Accept what you cannot change. Change what you can. And then the line everyone skims on the way to the end: the wisdom to know the difference.

That last one is the entire job. Because almost everything in your ghost bag has been quietly filed under cannot change. The friendship. The group. The room you will not open. And almost none of it belongs in that column. You are not powerless over any of it. You have decided you are, because deciding you are is easier than having the conversation.

Letting go of what no longer serves you sounds lovely on a cushion. In practice it means telling a woman you have known for twenty years that you will not be at coffee on Tuesday. It does not feel serene in the slightest. It only leads there.

· · ·

So here is the tool, and it is a body one, because your body has been keeping this list far longer than your head has.

At any point in your day, if there is a pit in your stomach or a lump in your throat, something in your ghost bag just surfaced. That is the whole test. No analysis, no journal prompt, no three hour think. Just the pit.

One caution. Nerves before something new feel almost identical and are not the same thing at all. Nerves point forward, at something you actually want. The pit points backward, at something you are still carrying. Learn the difference and you will never need me to tell you what is in that bag.

You can leave all of it in there. That is allowed. It is just not free. You pay in peace, in health, in joy, and in the space that could have held something you actually love now.

The only permission you need is your own. You are allowed to choose who is in your life.

· · ·

A QUESTION TO CARRY

Hit reply. I go where the inspiration takes me, as you have probably worked out by now, so I will not promise you where we land next.

· · ·

Charley's story goes up on The Crone Stories this Friday.

She sold real estate for forty five years and she was very good at it. She could walk into a stranger's house and know exactly who would buy it. Then her own house went on the market and sat there for four years.

She will tell you the rest herself. What I will say is that a long time ago she built something to keep herself safe, and it worked, and then thirty years went by and she was still the one holding it up.

Which is really the whole point of this letter. The ghost was never the house.

Her episode is called What She Wrote on the Fridge. Friday, wherever you listen.

In love, light and laughter,

Karen

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