I’m writing this for you from about 30,000 feet in the air.

I just paid for in-flight internet.
I have “Escape” by Yuna playing over my headphones.
And I am snuggly set between two very kind people on my flight to the West Coast.

I decided on Monday that I needed a trip.

By myself and on my own.

I was restless and couldn’t work out whatever was going on with me from the comforts of my own home. I needed something to shake up the routine and since school is out, my husband is away, and my dog has a daycare she loves–I figured I could work out my thoughts on the other side of the country.

It’s now Friday and away I go.

Before you all start thinking I’ve somehow lost it and am leaving you with my “I’m cutting my hair, changing my life, and running away from everything I know and love..let me set the record straight and give some other married women out there the insight they too might need to breathe deeply and drop a gem or two for single women who won’t see these feelings coming if they decide they’d like to get married one day.

So, let’s root this post in three unwavering truths:

1. I love my husband more now than I ever have in my life.
2. My life is a good one and I am grateful to be living it.
3. Everything I am about to tell you–I’ve already shared with my husband. (I don’t know how God graced me with a man who would deal with all of my crazy and still live to be ultimate hype-man).

And none of those truths change the fact that I am re-discovering who I am both as an individual and as part of a team. Because your identity doesn’t just change after you get married, it changes throughout your marriage.

Now, the only marriage and identity I can speak for is my own, so I’m going to do just that–but my prayer is that somehow from reading what I’ve been experiencing you too can find what you need for yourself and your marriage…maybe not all of it…or even most it, but some feeling or issue that resonates with you and where you currently are.

Anyone who knows me knows I own that my marriage still has its training wheels on but that doesn’t make my experiences less valuable. Especially for someone who hasn’t hit year 3 yet (which is where I’m headed in about a month and some change). So let’s take a brief stroll through my marriage, shall we?

Year 1: The first year of marriage our love goggles were so thick, I don’t know how we saw anything but each other. There was no one in the world but Shamar and I. Being a “Mrs.” was a part of my identity that I happily embraced. “My husband” became my favorite phrase (similar to how you become left handed for a few months after you get engaged regardless of which hand is actually dominant). We were extravagant with our surprises and our love felt electric.

Year 2: We moved to Atlanta and we were living our best lives–our goggles were a little thinner and our vision was able to expand beyond each other and to the incredible support system we had inherited in moving back down south. We had so much fun. We were at every festival and dinner party. Hosted game nights, Friendsgiving, and Christmas. Year 2 was the year of remembering what it felt like to be surrounded by love on all sides.

Year 3: We got a puppy! And bought a house! But I became more introverted than I’ve ever been. I knew who I was at work…but outside of work, it started to get a little hazy. Sacrifice felt like the most salient theme in our lives (and don’t get me wrong–shared sacrifice for shared goals…but that didn’t make it any easier). Life hit us so hard from death, to lost jobs, to health scares and while there is no one in the world I would have wanted by my side during those times–somehow being referred to as “Shamar’s wife” instead of Nicole (you know, the entire person I am) started to bother me in a way that it never had. I didn’t want to go anywhere or see anyone and life felt harder than it ever had.

And then came my high school reunion.

Shamar was out of town and so I went alone. For three days I spent time with people who only knew me when I was just a me and not an “us” or a “we”. While everyone was so sad Shamar wasn’t there because they had never met him, my old classmates and I had fun in ways I hadn’t in months.

And that’s when I started thinking about how different this Nicole was from the Nicole who had been moving in a fog that she didn’t even realize she was in for the past few months. This realization scared me and so ya’ll know I took it to my therapist’s couch a couple of days after returning from my trip.

I talked about how while I loved my life and my husband, something felt different and that I was afraid I was losing who I was. I cried as I shared wonderings about how good of a wife I was or how strong my marriage was if I thought of things like losing myself. Because the thing is, when folks give you marital advice it always seems to center around compromise, sacrifice, and teamwork but holding onto who you are is something I’ve rarely heard about.

My therapist told me that I was a great wife and this was completely normal.

Girl–say what!?

You see–statistically speaking, year 3 of marriage is when couples start settling into their routines and we were no different. While we were going through things that upset every routine in our lives, WE were still maintaining. Still going to work, still tag teaming chores, still making choices for our household.

Essentially, our marriage was riding on autopilot.

Not because we aren’t still deeply in love with one another, but because our goggles were thinner than ever and it was evident we were shouldering our responsibilities and the responsibilities of those closest to us. Suddenly, we were most concerned with how to cover our expenses and our parents. And that was different from when we were first dating and would just call out of work (even after the PTO ran out) so we could just be together all day.

But the problem with autopilot, is that unlike your car, your marriage is a living, breathing, thing that has to continue to be sustained.

And so is your individual identity.

And sometimes my marriage and my identity need different things and I’ve got to be intentional about satisfying it all.

So our marriage is riding on autopilot and once the dust settles from all the unexpected events life threw at us, I realize I have time to sit and think about who I am and  want to be in a way that I didn’t have in those first two years because I was so focused on breathing life into this new fragile relationship.

And when I looked up–I don’t like what I saw.

I like my spouse.
I like the life we’ve built.
I like the work I do.

But I don’t like the person who sits on the couch all the time, who thinks so much about the responsibilities of being an adult that she doesn’t devote time to the next experience she wants to have. Who has stopped extravagant surprises for the sake of getting work done.

But it took me a while to look up.
It wasn’t like I was moving through life thinking, “I hate how I’m more focused on the financial responsibilities of taking care of my parents instead of planning from an experience that will allow me to further grow and develop”. I was just grinding.

And that’s what dangerous.

The fact that we don’t even think about losing ourselves–until something feels so off that we finally look up and take stock of who we are and not just what we’re building.

So here I am, still on this plane (now jammin’ to The Carters Everything is Love) realizing that self-sacrifice and self-discovery (and re-discovery) have to co-exist. That regardless of the season, both my marriage and myself have to be nourished and sustained.

Nourishment for me right now looks like taking a solo trip to rest, think, and refocus my attention on who I am, what I want, and how I am going to make it happen.

And that I’m not a bad anything because of it.

And neither are you.

There’s magic in our musings (and in our individual identities),
Nicole