I ran out of storage this week…
Hi friends,
When I sat down to write this week’s newsletter, I did what I always do. I scrolled through my camera roll looking for inspiration. Normally there’s one obvious story. The roller skates. The sardines. The completely unhinged WhatsApp group.
This week?
Nothing.
Not because nothing happened. But because everything happened. My life feels so incredibly full right now that I honestly didn’t know which thread to pull.
This week alone I’ve seen clients in person, taken some amazing fitness classes, subbed a room full of pregnant women, taken Adina to Broadway, watched the Macy’s fireworks, danced salsa with grandmas and held babies at our old neighborhood block party, met a new (adult!) friend at the playground and somehow ended up talking for the next four hours, biked all over Brooklyn, wandered through our old neighborhood, and laughed way too hard at a man screaming at Taylor Swift because she had blocked traffic around MSG and he couldn’t get to his favorite ice cream shop.
Only in New York.
Some of my favorite moments weren’t even events. They were quiet ones. Sitting at my apartment window at 6AMi, coffee in hand, looking out over lower Manhattan before the city fully wakes up.
Then there was hugging a long time virtual client in real life that I haven't seen since covid.
Meeting another client for the first time after coaching her through two pregnancies from a computer screen.
Making a dinner table out of storage boxes in our living room because… well… that’s what we have at the moment.
Watching Adina rediscover what it means to be a New York kid, scootering absolutely everywhere with this giant grin on her face.
Full. Bursting-at-the-seams full. Heart-so-full-it-almost-hurts full.
And then…
There’s the storage unit.
We’ve spent the last week cleaning out everything we owned before moving to Barbados five years ago. Every box feels like opening a tiny time capsule.
Some things make me laugh. Some make me wonder why on earth I ever kept them...and what was I wearing? And some completely undo me. I found this tiny little blue baby coat tucked into a bin. I can picture Adina wearing it like it was yesterday. It fit in one hand. I immediately burst into tears.
Not because of the coat.
Because of time. Because somehow my little girl turns ten in a few weeks. Because this apartment that held eighteen years of our lives won’t be ours after July 31.
Because I’m realizing that even the happiest moments carry a little sadness when you know they can’t be repeated.
It’s like stepping into an alternate version of my own life. Everything feels familiar, but none of it belongs to me anymore. It belongs to eight million other New Yorkers who kept living here while we built a completely different life somewhere else.
And because the universe apparently has an excellent sense of humor… Everything else in my life is full too: my computer memory, my phone storage, my photo library. my email. If you emailed me this week and I didn’t respond, I promise I wasn’t ignoring you. My inbox literally stopped sending emails because I've run out of space.
So yes… EVERYTHING in my life is full.
But somewhere in the middle of deleting emails, sorting baby clothes, and deciding whether I really need to keep a random mixing bowl from 2009, I realized what’s actually making me emotional. It isn’t New York. It’s that I feel like I have two lives now.
There’s Barbados Joanie. And there’s New York Joanie.
They’re both me. They’re just… different versions of me. And if I’m honest, each one makes me miss the other a little.
It's like many of the conversations I’ve had with so many women navigating perimenopause. “I don’t feel like myself anymore.”
Except maybe that’s not quite true. Maybe you feel like two versions of yourself. The woman you’ve spent forty years becoming…and the woman you’re just beginning to meet.
Part of that feels exciting. I’m actually pretty pumped about entering my “no more Fs to give” era. Part of it feels terrifying. There’s grief. Grief for your younger body. Your old energy. The version of yourself you knew so well. Transitions are funny like that.
I remember crying when I got my first period. I remember crying while eating lunch alone at 39 weeks pregnant because I suddenly realized it was my last meal before becoming someone’s mom. I cried more tears than I can count over my postpartum body. And yes… I’ve absolutely stared at new gray hairs in the mirror thinking, “Well… this seems aggressive.”
None of those transitions were particularly graceful. But every single one eventually led me somewhere beautiful. History has become one of my greatest comforts. Because every time life has asked me to become someone new, I’ve eventually looked back and thought, “Oh. I like her.”
Maybe that’s the reminder I needed this week. We can’t stop change. We can’t stop kids from growing. We can’t stop leases from ending. We can’t stop hormones from shifting. But we can decide how we move through those transitions. We can mourn what was while still making room for what’s next. Those two things are allowed to exist together.
If this resonates with you and you’re in the New York area, I’d love to invite you to something I’m really excited about.
Next Tuesday I’m hosting a free workshop called Why Your Body Isn’t Responding the Way It Used To.
We’ll talk about what’s actually happening to our bodies through pregnancy, postpartum, perimenopause, menopause, and beyond. Why workouts stop feeling effective. Why your body feels different. And, most importantly, how to work with it instead of fighting against it.
📅 Tuesday, July 14 🕡 6:30 PM
📍 Freya Movement Studio (29th St. between 6th & 7th Ave)
And if someone popped into your mind while you were reading this…bring her or please share this info!
With a heart FULL of love,
Coach Joanie
