I've Stopped

A couple of weeks ago I stopped writing the column I have been producing every week since the fall of 1980.This is what I looked like when I started. I'm the one in the puffed sleeves, I should say, the one with the post growing out of her head.in  those 35+  years, I never once missed a deadline.I leaned in, you might say.I wrote it recovering from an early miscarriage and the fierce spinal headache that put me back in the hospital two days after the D & C.Two years later, I wrote it as labor began and finished it in the hospital the morning after the birth of our third child.That time, my husband took the copy home, typed in the final two paragraphs I had composed there in the hospital, photocopied it and put it in the mail to all my subscribing papers. (Transmitting a thing electronically to a newspaper was almost unheard of infancy then - heck,  faxing seemed to us all like a literal miracle - and for years there, filing the column meant quite mailing two fat handfuls of envelopes.)But this past summer, for the first time ever, I did take a little time off, only because the media group who was my biggest customer needed to cut its freelance budget,  and knew for first time what it felt like to be on  vacation. I enjoyed the break, though I felt kind of floaty as week after week passed and I stayed silent.But slowly, slowly over that time, I began to realize that for quite a while now, Change has been knocking at my own personal door. And so, a couple of weeks ago, I notified all my various editors to say that I was quitting.The Winchester Star's Melissa Russell who is among the most talented editors I have ever worked with, did this piece about my stepdown.In the next little while I'll come back to the topic of what it has felt like to stop doing a thing I have long been doing, and maybe I can ask you others what that experience has felt like to you.No longer the girl in the puffed sleeves with the wannabe Farrah Fawcett hair  I am content to be  just Terry,  just another blogger, peeping away in that vast blogger meadow.