NOT THIS, NOT ANYMORE

Photos captured today in the vibrant Fashion District by Mitchell Royel beautifully encapsulate the spirit and energy of the area. Each frame tells a story of style, individuality, and expression against the bustling urban backdrop. While exploring these visuals, we’ve been immersed in the ethereal sounds of I Think You Made Me Up by Chymes, perfectly complementing the creative atmosphere and inspiring a mood of introspection and artistry.

We're entering the era of tearing shit up.

We feel it. That low hum in our bones that says the old shape doesn't fit anymore. The dress split at the seams. The vows we made to ourselves before we knew ourselves. The chandelier's swinging and we've got both hands wrapped around it, feet kicking out over everything we used to call home.

"See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?" — Isaiah 43:19

We perceive it. We just didn't expect it to feel like this.

Long story short: we're going through a phase.

Bad breakup.
But not with a boy.
God, no.
This one's bigger and meaner and older
than any man could ever be.

This is a breakup with broken promises.

With island spaces that felt like sanctuary and turned out to be waiting rooms. With every "forever" we swallowed whole because someone said it soft enough to sound like love.

We know the ones. The forevers that come pre-wrapped. Boxed in. String tied around them in a bow, so pretty we didn't notice we were the thing inside the box. Archetypes. The Good Woman. The Patient One. The One Who Stays. We wore them like they were ours. We made whole altars out of somebody else's blueprint.

So we left.

We're out of the house. Physically, spiritually, cellularly. And here's the thing nobody warns us about — sometimes we don't decide to go. Something in us decides for us. Something ancient. The woman underneath the woman. She's got dirt under her nails and no patience left, and she reached down into the roots of the life we'd built and she pulled. Not gently. She uprooted the whole thing and shook it out and said, not this, not anymore, not us shrunk down to fit.

And she was right. She's always right. That's the terrifying part.

There is a season for everything — a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to keep and a time to throw away. Ecclesiastes 3 told us. We just didn't know our season would arrive on a Tuesday wearing someone else's band shirt and no plan whatsoever.

So today — and for the rest of the week, honestly — we're in the basement with the boys from down the street.

Yeah. That's where the uprooting landed us. Not on a mountaintop. Not in a retreat with white linen and healing tea. The basement. The actual basement — concrete floors, bad lighting, someone's old sectional that's seen better decades, and the boys from down the street spread out across it like they own the world.

And they're dressing us up.

That's the part we couldn't have scripted. The boys from down the street — the ones who grew up on this block, who we've known since before any of us knew anything — they've got drugstore makeup spread out on the coffee table like it's a war council. Cheap stuff. The kind that comes in packaging that's more ambition than product. The kind that smells like plastic and something strangely like possibility. One of them has a sponge he's wielding with more confidence than anyone should have about a sponge. Another one's arguing about blush placement like there's a wrong answer and he's personally offended by it. A third one's holding up two shades of lipstick, squinting, totally serious, football game still blasting behind him.

And the football game is on. Loud. There are men yelling at other men about what the other men are doing, and occasionally everyone in the room yells too, and then someone turns back to our face and resumes the debate about whether we're a "warm autumn" or just a person who needs more blush.

We're watching the game. We don't even know the teams. We don't care about the teams. But we're watching it anyway, because that's what we do when we're sitting in a basement letting the boys from down the street put drugstore eyeshadow on our lids while the world outside keeps moving without us — we watch the game. We eat whatever someone passes us. We exist inside the strange, specific grace of being completely held by people who aren't trying to fix us, just keep us company while we figure out what comes next.

We're just sitting here letting it happen. All of it. The game, the blush debate, the sponge, the noise. We're letting it wash over us like it means something, because maybe it does.

We're wearing his Nirvana shirt. It's so faded it's practically a ghost of itself — the logo cracked and peeling, the cotton worn down to something closer to skin than fabric. We pulled it on without thinking, the way we do with things that used to mean something, and now here we are, sitting in a basement with blush on our cheekbones and his band on our chest, and we're not sure if that's irony or just grief wearing a funny hat. It still smells like the version of us that made promises in rooms we've since walked out of. The version that stayed. The one we had to leave behind to find out who else we could be.

The football game is on and we're watching it with the boys from down the street. All of us together on that busted sectional, shoulders close, someone's feet on the coffee table, drugstore makeup spread out between the chip bowls like it belongs there. Like this is just what we do on a Tuesday. Like a woman in crisis in a Nirvana shirt getting her under-eyes blended by a guy who learned everything he knows from a YouTube tutorial is completely normal and fine.

It is, actually. That's the thing. It's completely normal and fine.

We've never liked football. We couldn't tell you the rules if our lives depended on it, and our lives have never depended on it, and yet here we are, genuinely invested in whatever is happening on that screen because the boys are invested and when we're in the basement with the boys from down the street, we catch the current of what they care about and we ride it. We yell when they yell. We groan when they groan. We hold our face very still when someone is doing something delicate near our eye with a sponge, and then we go back to yelling.

There's something holy about it. We mean that.

"Where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them." — Matthew 18:20

We don't think that was specifically about a busted sectional and drugstore blush, but we're going to go ahead and claim it anyway. Because there is something sacred about not knowing what we're doing and doing it anyway. About sitting inside a moment that makes no logical sense — blush on our cheekbones, grief in our chest, football on the TV, our whole former lives scattered somewhere behind us like a trail we don't plan to follow back — and just being there. Fully. Stupidly. Without a plan.

These boys aren't trying to heal us. They're not asking the right questions or holding space or offering insights about our journey. They're arguing about lipstick shades and yelling at a screen and passing us things to eat without being asked, and that is — we're going to say it — that is love. Imperfect, five-dollar-eyeshadow, completely unqualified love. And we are letting it in. All the way in. Because she — the woman underneath the woman, the one who uprooted everything — she didn't drag us out of that old life so we could perform our healing in a dignified way. She brought us here. To the basement. To the boys. To the game we don't understand and the blush we didn't ask for and the shirt we can't stop wearing.

She's running wild, and we're letting her.

We don't know where this is going. We genuinely don't.

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding." — Proverbs 3:5

So we're not leaning on understanding. We don't have any. We're leaning on the sectional. We're leaning into the blush argument. We're leaning into not knowing.

We might just be women in a basement with smudged drugstore eyeliner and a dead man's band on our chest, watching a game we don't understand while the boys from down the street argue about whether our lip color is doing enough. Going nowhere in particular. Going everywhere at once. We genuinely do not know where any of this is headed — not tomorrow, not next week, not past the next commercial break — and for the first time in a long time, we're not trying to figure it out.

We're letting her run wild.

The woman underneath the woman. The one who made the call to leave, to uproot, to shake the whole thing loose and see what fell. We spent so many years managing her, quieting her, dressing her up in something more acceptable and nudging her back into her lane. And now she's here, sprawled out on a broken sectional with blush on her cheekbones and grief in her pocket and not a single apology on her lips, and we're done trying to steer. She knows something we don't. She always has.

So we're in it. All the way in it. Eyeliner smudged, hearts cracked open, Nirvana shirts and all. And honestly? That's more than we've been in years. That's more alive than we've been in years.

So here we go.

Sorry for the rant.
Except we're not, actually.
Not even a little.
-Ryder, GG Collective

Epilogue: Weeks later, the makeup's long washed off. The Nirvana shirt lives in a drawer now, folded, no longer a costume — just soft cotton that once meant something.

We didn't find our new lives in the basement. That's not how it works. The basement wasn't the destination. It was the doorway. The messy, ridiculous, tender threshold we had to walk through to prove to ourselves we could survive the not-knowing.

"He brought me out into a spacious place; he rescued me because he delighted in me." — Psalm 18:19

The uprooting held.
Nothing grew back the way it was.
Everything grew back the way it was meant to.

And the woman underneath the woman? She's quieter now. She got what she wanted. She's not swinging from anything anymore.

She's just standing.
On ground she chose.
In shoes that are actually hers.