I would like to formally resign from adulthood and take up my true vocation: full‑time whimsical forest fairy with a garden, a stack of library books, good coffee, and too many dogs.
If you’re curious about how I got here, I wrote more about turning forty and the version of my life that didn’t happen over here.
All I want instead is painfully simple: dogs snoring on the floor, dirt under my nails, trees outside the window, a mug in my hand, and enough calm in my nervous system to actually notice that I’m alive.
On paper, my life looks fine. Respectable, even. There’s a job with responsibilities and meetings. There are bills that get paid more or less on time, a decent credit score, and a calendar full of things that prove I can pass for a functioning adult. From the outside, it reads as “has her life together.” From the inside, it feels a lot more like I’m spending my limited energy keeping a machine running that I never actually asked for.
“Burnout” isn’t quite the word for it. Burnout sounds like I need a long weekend and a eucalyptus candle from Target. This is more like standing in a life my husband and I worked hard for and realizing I’m too tired to enjoy any of it. I’ve put my body behind glass for years in the name of work and responsibility, and now it’s banging on the window asking for trees, sun, and the kind of quiet you can’t get from a white‑noise app. It’s not that I want to do nothing. I’m just not sure I want to keep doing this.
My preferred job description these days is short and a little embarrassing in its clarity: love my husband, love my dogs, tend a garden, read books, walk in the forest, be kind to the people within reach.
That’s it. That’s the whole list. I do not secretly long to “scale” into a brand. I would like to downgrade my ambitions to “content, useful, and outside as much as possible” and call it good. Let other people chase legacy; I want to know which bird is making that sound.
This isn’t just a fantasy anymore; it’s the version of our life I’m quietly aiming us toward. He gets to do work he doesn’t hate, I get to do work that doesn’t break my body with stress and lack of movement, and neither of us is shackled to work we resent. I grow tomatoes that may or may not cooperate, keep the dogs alive and loved, and know exactly where my library card is at all times. And together we continue to do enough paid work to keep the lights on, trading the noise of “more, more, more” for something smaller, slower, and actually ours.
In reality, there are still bills with both our names on them. There is still work, which refuses to evaporate just because our priorities have shifted. There is still a future we’re supposed to plan for, even if my preferred retirement plan is “live in a small place near trees until further notice.”
So for now I haven’t burned it all down. I show up. I log in. I do what has to be done, even on the days when my whole body is screaming that this cannot be all there is. He shows up too, and we keep trying to make sure the life we’re paying for is one we actually want to be in.
What I can do is start tilting the balance. Take my coffee outside instead of drinking it hunched over a screen. Put my hands in actual dirt as often as my body allows. Let the dogs pull me toward the nearest patch of green and treat it like a standing appointment instead of a treat.
Say no to one more thing that looks good on paper but costs me hours I don’t get back.
Remember that wanting a small, gentle, woods‑adjacent life is not a failure of imagination; it’s a perfectly reasonable response to a world that keeps trying to convince us that exhaustion is a love language.
I don’t know how long I have, and I don’t get the version of life where my body never complains. What we can have, if we’re careful and stubborn enough, is this: dogs, garden, forest, books, coffee, bills that still get paid, and a life that feels, if nothing else, like it at least belongs to us.