The Thing I Never Wanted To Lose

Tatsuda's produce department: Post Remodel 2016

I didn’t want the work anymore.

But I never wanted to lose this.

What the landslide took wasn’t just a building, or a business, or a role I had long outgrown. It took my daily belonging. My place in the fabric of a community. The quiet knowing of where I fit without having to explain myself.

Tatsuda’s was never just a grocery store to me.

It was the hum of familiar voices before I ever reached my office. The smell of coffee near the front doors in the early morning. The way people said my name like it was part of the place itself. It was where I was seen without effort—woven into the rhythm of the town by history, repetition, and shared life.

I could be exhausted by the work and still anchored by the place.

Those things were never mutually exclusive.

And even when I was unhappy—when the work no longer fit who I was becoming—the store was still my purpose. It was my main priority. In my mind, it would succeed no matter what. I would make sure of it.

I reorganized my life around that certainty. I endured what I needed to endure. I kept showing up, believing that my responsibility was to hold the thing steady—for my family, my employees, and the community that relied on it.

That devotion mattered.

It wasn’t passive. It wasn’t accidental.

The loss, then, was sudden and violent. There was no gradual transition, no closing ritual, no chance to loosen my grip gently. One day it was there. The next, it wasn’t. And with it went a lifetime of small, grounding moments—conversations, recognition, continuity.

That kind of loss doesn’t register as career change.

It lands in the body like exile.

I didn’t just lose what I did.

I lost where I belonged.

And even now, years later, that destabilization still shows up—not as longing for the past, but as the ache of missing a place where I didn’t have to earn my right to be known.

What’s hard to explain is this: I had already begun to outgrow the role. I knew, intellectually and spiritually, that I was meant for more than the daily grind I had inherited. I had begun expanding, imagining, stepping toward something truer.

But I never imagined that expansion would require this kind of severing.

I never wanted to lose the community just because I no longer wanted the job.

Grief doesn’t always follow logic.

Sometimes it mourns what was good even when it was no longer right.

The landslide didn’t just clear space for what came next. It collapsed a foundation that had held me for decades. And foundations don’t disappear without consequence.

What I’ve had to learn—slowly, imperfectly—is that being strong at my core doesn’t mean I won’t feel unmoored when something sacred is taken. That clarity doesn’t prevent heartbreak. That identity can remain intact even when belonging is stripped away.

I am still who I am.

Truth-led. Intentional. Unable to live a lie.

But I am also a human being who lost a home.

Not a house.

A field of belonging.

What I’m building now isn’t a replacement.

It’s a re-seeding.

A new field of belonging—chosen rather than inherited, mutual rather than assumed. A place where connection doesn’t ask me to endure, only to arrive.

It’s still unfolding. And sometimes I still miss what held me.

But I trust what I’m cultivating now.

Because this time, belonging isn’t tied to a building or a role or a lifetime of obligation.

It’s rooted in who I am.

And that foundation can’t be taken from me.