Mostly Fine Life

Mostly Fine — not flashy, not finished, still figuring it out.

I didn’t fully realise I was on this journey until life hit me with the big smacks — losing my lovely Mum and my job in the same week. Talk about a double whammy. Nothing like that to sharpen the senses, to put everything into focus abruptly, painfully. But looking back, I can see now that I had been on it for some time. Small choices, tiny acts of care, little shifts in how I live — they were all laying the groundwork. And yet, the job is never really “done.” Life, I’m learning, is just one tiny renovation after another.

Buying this small spec home in a town just outside the city I was living and working in feels like one of those invisible, preparatory renovations. Affordable, yes. But more than that, it was new. Concrete floor. Blank section. Double glazing. What?!  A heatpump. What?! After decades in damp, cold houses, the thought of warmth, dryness, and a house that simply worked felt like a miracle. And I didn’t know then how much that space would mirror the work I’d been quietly doing on myself all along.

The house was small, and there were plenty of raised eyebrows about that. Seventy square metres did not impress anyone. The town did not impress anyone. There was “nothing there.” But I wasn’t looking for impressive. I was looking for manageable. I was looking for warm. I was looking for a life that felt steady rather than stretched.

For five years the house remained mostly as it was built. Clean. Functional. Slightly anonymous. The kitchen walls were blank, perfectly adequate, entirely forgettable. And then the tilers came. Five years in. By that point I had lived in the house long enough to know it, and to know myself in it. When the tiles finally went up on the kitchen walls, what had been a sensible, practical, slightly echoey space became grown up. Sophisticated in a quiet way. Not flashy. Not neon. Not designed to make anyone gasp. It simply felt calm and assured.

It fit me in a way I hadn’t fully articulated before. I am an introvert, though people often assume otherwise. I can be capable and sociable and energetic when required. I can perform competence. But what actually nourishes me is serenity, subtlety, a kind of quiet confidence that doesn’t need to announce itself. The kitchen now reflects that back to me. It feels like a marker of the life I choose to shape. Not dramatic. Not chaotic. Just considered.

And then everything shifted in ways I could never have planned for. Losing Mum was the biggest and most devastating loss of my life. There isn’t really language that captures what it means to lose the person who knew you before you were competent, before you were independent, before you built a life of your own. She was my anchor in a way I didn’t fully understand until she was gone. I remember thinking, the moment she took her last breath, that the world had gone on without pause — the clock kept ticking, almost cruelly, as if unaware of the weight of what had just happened. Since it all happened, I have felt numb more often than not. Numb feels like the body’s way of surviving what would otherwise be unbearable.

Redundancy followed, and with it another layer of loss — this time, of an identity I had always clung to. Outside of my familial role, I had defined myself by my job. By being useful. By kidding myself that I was doing something important, something that mattered. And then, almost overnight, everything I had built was dismantled. I was no longer “at the table.” Ironically, it took two years for the hammer to finally fall, so when it did, it was almost anti-climactic. It wasn’t until I looked at my diary one day — completely empty — that the reality really hit home. I simply wasn’t needed. Suddenly, I had to find a way to redefine myself, to figure out who I was when usefulness, structure, and work no longer defined me.

In all of this, the house has become more than shelter. It is my safe space in the most literal sense. The double glazing holds back more than wind. The tiled kitchen walls reflect a version of me that feels steady, even when I don’t. Every decision I make — tiles, paint, plants, even the hum of a heatpump — feels like another layer of deliberate shaping. There is no final reveal. No finished product. Just the ongoing, sometimes wobbly, quietly satisfying process of building a life that feels steady, calm, and, yes, mostly fine.

Looking at the journey of this house — from blank concrete and anonymous walls to something warm and quietly sophisticated — I can see the parallel in myself. Shaping a home did not happen all at once. It happened slowly, deliberately, within constraints. I did not have an unlimited budget or unlimited space. I worked with what was available and made choices that reflected who I was becoming. And the same is true of shaping a life. One small, considered choice at a time. One quiet renovation after another.

Even if I had to move one day — and I know I won’t live here forever; my life seems to run in cycles of around eight years or so — even if this particular haven turned out to be a chapter rather than the whole book, the deeper thing I’ve built is the knowing that I can choose the feel of my life. Not flashy. Not neon. Quietly confident. Peaceful. Grown up. And you know the cool thing about what I’m realising? I didn’t follow the path that people expected me to follow, or run with the cool crowd, because it turns out that the real renovation was never just the kitchen — it is the ongoing, sometimes painful, often quiet work of becoming someone who lives deliberately. And in it all, I am, I realise, mostly fine. And that feels good.

Postscript soundtrack: Holocene by Bon Iver, playing softly in the background, stretching gently, steady and hopeful, a quiet companion to the work that will always be ongoing.