Micah: Version 2.0

26 years of marriage, Day 2 minus the coma, and a much-needed system upgrade.

One week from today, Husband¹ and I will have been married for 26 years.

That number doesn’t feel real. I was 26 when we got married, which means I’ve now been married for as long as I’d been alive at that point. In honor of the occasion, we pulled out our wedding pictures to share with the girls. As we turned the pages, it was sobering to realize how many of our loved ones have passed away — including my father, who died in 2024. And how many friends and family have reproduced, growing our circle in beautiful ways. A lot has changed over 26 years. Some of it shows up in photographs. Some of it doesn’t.

This post is about the second kind of change.

To celebrate our anniversary, Husband and I went away for the weekend to a beautiful inn about an hour outside of town. The property sits on farmland: green rolling hills, wildflowers, tall native grasses, and pea gravel pathways that crunch beneath your feet. We arrived Friday evening and slept until our bodies woke up on Saturday.

On Sunday morning, I waited for the familiar feeling that usually washes over me on the last day of a trip — the weight of all the tasks and obligations awaiting me at home. The running of the list.

It didn’t come.

As I sat on our balcony, listening to the rush of water and watching the leaves move in the breeze, I realized I felt relaxed. My thoughts were slow and flowing. Historically, this kind of calm didn’t arrive until at least Day 3 of a vacation, and it typically required a physical collapse: going to bed before dark, sleeping twelve hours, waking up slightly dazed. How was I here on Day 2, without the coma?

I started to ramp down my pace at work about two years ago. It has taken nearly the entirety of that time to adjust my inner command center. For as long as I can remember, my default setting has been frantic — rushing from one thing to the next, living in constant anticipation of what might fall through the cracks if I lost focus. I knew this intellectually. But I didn’t recognize the tension in my body, and I didn’t realize that the noise in my head wasn’t essential to survival.

What I realized last weekend is that I was able to ramp down faster because I didn’t have as much distance to cover. Rather than traveling from vigilant intensity to relaxed, I only had to go from a regular, manageable pace to rest.

Once I recognized this shift, I started thinking about all the other signals my body had been sending — ones I hadn’t heard, or hadn’t allowed myself to hear. The pull toward spending more time reading for pleasure. The impulse to reconnect with my creativity. The neutral colors and natural, soft fabrics that never appealed to me before. Getting dressed used to be about putting on my protective shell — my professional gloss. Getting dressed lately has been about slipping into a comfortable, cozy space. Same act. Completely different experience.

It would be easy to spiral into despair over the consequences of running tightly wound for so long. The conversations with my children when I was only half-listening, part of my brain calculating how much work I still had left. The times with friends when I was too tired to show up fully, treating the time as an obligation rather than a gift. The vacations where Day 1 and Day 2 were essentially recovery from my regular life rather than actual rest. And on another level — the mornings I got dressed on autopilot and felt slightly wrong all day but couldn’t name why.

I’m choosing not to spiral. Not because those things don’t matter, but because the regret doesn’t change them, and the awareness already has. I still have what I call “Old Micah” days — days when I feel rushed and overwhelmed, when the motor revs and the noise returns. But there’s a trigger switch now that didn’t exist before. It flips when I sense the old frequency building. Those days aren’t me falling back into past patterns. They’re temporary bumps, and I’ve built in breathing room.

I feel deeply lucky to have the opportunity to shift down. Not everyone has this chance.

But the change that matters most isn’t the external one. It’s not the reduced schedule or the slower calendar. Those things are structural. Tactical. What feels genuinely different is less tangible — a complete overhaul of the operating system. And once version 2.0 has been installed, there’s no way to run the system on the old platform.

A lot can change in 26 years. But a lot can change in two.

Are you running version 1.0 or 2.0 these days? If you’re still on 1.0, what needs to shift? If you’ve upgraded, I’d love to hear how you got there. Reply and let me know.

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The idea for All of a Kind Style originated in this group (Artist’s Way Group for Jewish Women). If you’re a Jewish woman who is hungry for more creativity in your life and aren’t sure where to start, or if you have a specific creative goal and want to make real progress, I highly recommend it. Pam is an excellent facilitator, and the work is so much easier and more enjoyable with a supportive, warm group of women surrounding you.

1. For those who are new here, my husband requested this pseudonym. Whatever that says to you about his personality is probably true. 😉