An Opening

“There’s something humbling about realizing your timeline isn’t real…

[it] felt like an expiration date.
Now it feels like an opening.”

Danielle Bernstein

By: Gabriela Yareliz

I always want to play a game, but we never have enough people to do so. I got this new conversation game from Wilde Paper that I wanted to open, so we did that.

The weirdest thing happened in that as the game progressed, I was irked by two things— I felt that we players were not playing with the vulnerability the game requires, and as I looked at the questions, I felt like I couldn’t answer half of the questions, and the ones I could answer, had sad answers. I was disappointed by the actual answers I did have.

Sometimes, things intrude and remind us of how little has worked out for us as desired. A flood of shame and disappointment leave us soaked. I ended up in a crappy mood and deeply in my head.

I think I have been even more in my head because I am going back home soon after years of not being back. Which I guess isn’t home anymore because nothing is the same. It’s a place I likely won’t recognize. It’s my husband’s first time visiting, and I am not sure how it works to introduce someone to a place you barely recognize yourself. The last time I was there I felt very dependent and ended up just tagging along, and this time I want it to be different.

I want to see it through a different lens. I want to see it with some detachment. It can be very hard to go back to places where you felt broken or like a different person. I suppose that happens to all of us at some point or another. I wonder how it will be different seeing everything, not through a lens of manic survival but maturity.

When you have lived in as many places as I have (there are 8 grades from elementary through middle school, and I went to six different schools during that span), and everything is different, you realize home is a figment of memory and imagination. Everything you knew doesn’t exist anymore. Poof! You sort of belong nowhere and nowhere belongs to you.

This time of year feels slightly triggering due to past loss and deep confusion. There is that.

Along with all of this, I am approaching a birthday. And birthdays remind us of the timelines we built in our heads and either how accomplished or how behind we feel. I am trying to shift my slightly sour and exhausted disposition before then.

I was reading Danielle Bernstein’s Substack, and she had that quote I included above. It made me wonder what would happen if I reframed self-imposed expiration dates and that feeling of displacement and foreignness with the thought that this is an opening.

An opening for what?— we do not know. That is the tricky part with dealing with uncertainty. But an opening for something.

I have two weeks for a true shift. I am trying. As someone who has not felt healthy all of 2026, I am a bit of a Debby Downer. (I literally have these Christian healing affirmation cards to keep spirits up, healing is coming. This is where I am at). But it needs to happen. I can’t enter a new year hyper-fixated on random bits. Entering a better headspace is always a choice, and it’s not always easy and requires intentionality, but it’s possible.

Going to continue leaning into gratitude and agency. The tension I keep feeling in the pit of my stomach will need some release— movement, I guess?

If anyone knows that you can end up in the most unexpected places, it’s me. That has definitely been a theme in my life. Home can be found inside, and we can belong to each other. And every minute of time we get is a gift. We never know when the clock will run out on us.

Sometimes, things feel messy, but it doesn’t mean good isn’t around the corner.

All these mixed circumstances and feelings just mean an opening is here.