The Start Of Something New

Katherine Tatsuda
23 hours ago
7 min read

September 4, 2026

This is not how I expected this week to go.

Not even a little bit.

A few days ago, I thought this week was going to be an exercise in endurance. One more stretch of putting my head down and getting through it. I had reached a point where living in Ketchikan felt almost unbearable to me. I was lonely. Bored. Uninspired. So completely done with this chapter of my life, and yet still living inside of it.

I kept thinking I needed to finish things before I could leave.

Get the house ready. Deal with my belongings. Figure out the animals. Handle the properties. Tie up the loose ends. Make responsible decisions in the responsible order.

And because there was so much to do, leaving remained somewhere out there.

Then, two days ago, something shifted.

I realized I didn’t actually have to finish my old life before I was allowed to begin my new one.

I could leave.

I could establish a life somewhere else and come back to Ketchikan in smaller stretches to deal with what remains. I could stop making my departure the reward I received for completing an enormous list of things that could take months.

It was such a simple shift in thinking.

And it changed everything.

Suddenly, the giant question of How do I leave Ketchikan? became a handful of practical questions.

I needed somewhere to live.

I needed a car.

I needed to figure out how to move my animals.

So I started.

I looked at the practical pieces in front of me and realized there was absolutely no reason I couldn’t start figuring them out now.

So I booked a ticket to Seattle for the next day.

Thank goodness for miles.

There wasn’t some carefully orchestrated relocation plan behind it. I just knew I needed forward momentum, and sitting in Ketchikan trying to think my way through every possible complication wasn’t giving me any.

I searched for houses. I sent messages. I scheduled tours. I made an appointment to test-drive cars.

And the next day, I got on a plane.

Then today happened.

The first house I walked into was almost ridiculously right.

It is tucked away in a beautiful, green Seattle neighborhood, off the beaten path but close to everything. Just down the hill is Carkeek Park, with its trails and trees and beach and miles of places to wander.

The house has hardwood floors and a fireplace and enough room for my life. There is a huge fenced backyard with raised garden beds and fruit trees. Space for my dogs. A place where I can imagine figuring out a new rhythm for my indoor-outdoor cats.

And there is room for my kids.

That mattered more than I expected it to.

My two college kids can come home for breaks and actually come home. They can have space. We can be together without being piled on top of one another. This could become a new family home base, even as all of our lives are changing.

I submitted the rental application.

Then I went to test-drive cars.

I had three scheduled. I drove one. Sat in another and knew immediately it wasn’t for me. Drove a third and liked it, but it wasn’t what I wanted.

So I asked the salesman a question about another model.

They happened to have a certified pre-owned one.

It was blue, with this beautiful warm caramel-colored interior.

I drove it.

And I knew.

I bought a car.

Later, I drove my new car back to the house I had just applied to rent and parked it outside.

And there it was.

A photograph of a life that didn’t exist two days ago.

I stood there looking at it, and suddenly the distance wasn’t two days.

It was a year.

Because almost exactly one year ago, I was standing at the beginning of a very different kind of unknown.

There was no blue car. No little brick house in Seattle. No city beginning to feel like it might become home. There wasn’t even a plan that would have led me here.

Last year at this time, I had just left my new career as a financial advisor.

I didn’t have another career waiting for me. I didn’t have a solid plan. I thought maybe I would eventually leave Ketchikan, but I had absolutely no idea where I would go.

I knew I wanted to free up my life. I knew that meant shedding properties and obligations I had accumulated. But I didn’t know when any of that would happen. I didn’t know how I would untangle the gas station property or what would become of everything else.

Mostly, I was bleeding.

I was grieving.

I was raw and heartbroken from a relationship I was only beginning to understand as abusive. I was powering forward through extraordinarily difficult school board work, and I didn’t yet know that some of the hardest parts of that journey hadn’t even happened.

There was so much I couldn’t see.

And strangely, I knew that was exactly where I needed to be.

Somewhere deep inside myself, I understood that the way through that period of my life wasn’t going to be to immediately construct another plan and grip it tightly.

It was going to be surrender.

I needed to let myself enter the liminal space between what had been and whatever was coming next.

I knew, sort of, the direction I was heading.

Toward freedom.

Toward fewer obligations.

Toward a life that felt more like mine.

Toward peace and possibility and something I couldn’t quite name yet.

But I couldn’t see the road.

So, for perhaps one of the first times in my life, I stopped demanding that I see it.

I surrendered to the unknown.

And then I lived there.

For a year.

And I didn’t spend that year quietly waiting for my life to reveal itself.

I cried.

A lot.

I grieved things I couldn’t fix and losses I couldn’t undo. I wrote my way through pain I sometimes thought would swallow me whole.

And at the same time, I did incredibly difficult, high-level executive leadership work, essentially as a volunteer. I walked into rooms carrying enormous responsibility. I made decisions that affected an entire community. I navigated conflict and crisis and politics and personalities, often while pieces of my own life were still bleeding.

I taught myself to crochet.

I graduated my son from high school and then packed him up, drove him to college, and left him there to begin his own life.

I traveled.

I went on dates.

I met new people.

I let myself be curious about what might happen next.

I said yes to possibility.

And I learned to say no when something wasn’t right.

I kept moving, sometimes quickly and sometimes almost imperceptibly.

And somewhere in all of that, I transformed.

I am not the same woman who stood at the edge of the unknown last September.

Not even close.

I thought surrendering to the liminal space meant allowing myself not to know what came next.

I didn’t understand that the space itself would change me.

I alchemized.

I took grief and heartbreak and uncertainty and loneliness and responsibility and possibility and turned them into something else.

Not because I figured everything out.

Because I lived through all of it without abandoning myself.

And now here I am.

One year later.

Back in front of that little brick house.

Beside a blue car I had just bought.

Two days ago, I thought I was facing another period of endurance. Today I was standing in a city I can actually imagine building a life in, looking at a photograph of a future that had suddenly become tangible.

And I realized something.

I didn’t transform in these two days.

These two days revealed the transformation that had been happening for a year.

The woman who stood at the edge of the unknown last September could not see where any of this was going. She just knew she had to stop forcing the answers and trust herself enough to keep moving.

The woman standing here now knows how to move differently.

Toward possibility.

Pay attention.

Say yes when something feels right.

Say no when it doesn’t.

Ask another question.

Choose.

Nothing about this new life is guaranteed yet.

The house isn’t mine until it is mine. There is still an enormous amount to figure out in Ketchikan. There are animals to move and belongings to sort and properties to deal with and responsibilities I will continue to carry for a while.

But I don’t need all of those things resolved anymore to know that something has changed.

Because maybe this entire year has been teaching me the same thing.

There are times when we need a plan.

And there are times when the plan itself becomes the thing keeping us stuck.

Sometimes the shift is simply realizing that the order we thought things had to happen in isn’t actually the order they have to happen in at all.

I thought I had to finish before I could begin.

I don’t.

I can begin while some things remain unfinished.

I can build the next life while dismantling pieces of the old one.

I can move toward what feels alive before I have every answer about what I am leaving behind.

Last year, I surrendered to the unknown because I knew there was something on the other side of it, even though I couldn’t see what it was.

Today, for the first time, I think I caught a glimpse.