There’s an old chair in the corner of my bedroom that I walked past for probably two years without really seeing it. It just held clothes or random things that needed to be put away that didn’t have a home yet. A few weeks ago, I finally cleared it off, replaced the chair, and made the cutest little reading nook. Now it’s the first thing I see when I open my eyes in the morning and the last thing I look at before I turn off the light, and it truly makes me so happy.

I don’t know why it took me two years to notice enough to care. It didn’t take much time or any major work. I think I just stopped seeing it as something that could be changed a long time ago. It became part of the room, and once something becomes part of the room, you stop noticing it needs anything from you at all.

That’s one kind of maintenance.

There’s another kind, and it’s been showing up in how I plan my days. I’ve tried Notion. I’ve tried a paper planner. I’ve tried just dumping everything into my notes app and hoping I’d remember to check it off. I had plenty of lists, and I have plenty of plans. Yet, somehow, I was still missing things and still felt behind on my own life. So I put it all in one place, Google Calendar, and stopped trying to make four systems talk to each other. Its simplicity has already made me feel so much better.

And then there’s the maintenance I’m doing right now that doesn’t look like either of those.

I spent a long time trying to heal my gut and get back to a healthy weight, in the middle of a season I’ve written about before, when I started over with almost nothing else going right. Long enough that reaching the goal started to feel like something that happened to other people, not something that would actually happen to me. And then it did. It is genuinely surreal to make it to somewhere you spent years being told, even by yourself, that you might not.

Now I’m just working on maintaining it, which sounds simple, but it isn’t always. I’m eating the way that got me here, whole foods, lower-healthy carb, but I’m also paying closer attention than I ever have to what my body specifically needs to stay steady instead of sliding back up or losing more than I want to. I’m relearning recipes. I’m relearning the importance of ingredient quality. I’m relearning a body that doesn’t move through the world the same way it used to.

I am so proud of this accomplishment.

And I also want to acknowledge that I don’t fully recognize the reflection in the mirror just yet. Not in a bad way, but even though I reached my goal, that doesn’t mean all of the hard feelings go away. Both things can be true at the same time. And right now, they are.

That’s the thing with maintaining something: there really is no finish line. The goal has one. This doesn’t.

Some weeks the work is starting something brand new. Some weeks, it’s noticing the chair in the corner and finally doing something about it. And some weeks it’s standing in front of a mirror, seeing someone you don’t fully recognize yet, and being so incredibly proud of her.