I wrote this essay almost exactly ten years ago, the summer after Jessica graduated from high school and I was feeling restless. It never quite fit into any of the memoirs I’ve written about my life with her, so it’s never been published anywhere but my blog, and I wanted to share it again as one of my favorites moments of just being, a concept and a state that I aspire to reaching a little more often than I ever do.

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Trust your cape, the guy with the guitar sings. Life is a leap of faith.

He is a middle-aged smiling man, busking at the plaza in historic Santa Fe on a warm summer afternoon. I’m here with Jessica, a few months after her high school graduation.

Our trip to Europe will begin later in the month, and I have a lot to do: sort through everything we own, donate what we no longer need, stuff everything else into a storage unit, pack for six weeks on the road in Europe and an indefinite amount of time after that, finish three editorial projects I’m working on, write a newsletter. If I had any shred of sense left, which apparently I do not, I would be at home doing those things. Or at least making lists about them.

But I am not. My face is lifted to the sun approximately eight hundred miles away from the packing that needs to be done and there is neither a pen nor a pad of paper within reach. I am here because I’m tired of being there.

Across the way, a man says to his companion, “What is that called? When you save for retirement?”

And I laugh. I don’t know what that’s called either. If I had any shred of sense left, which apparently I do not, I would be stuffing my money in an IRA instead of spending it on plane tickets and traveling shoes. Or at least not laughing about my recklessness.

I am a Woman Without a Plan.

It wasn’t always this way. For a long time I was the most goal-oriented person you have ever met, your traditional Type A control freak, and I was good at it. I loved piling up accomplishments, even the weird ones like breaking concrete blocks with my hands, until one day I didn’t. What I have accomplished by doing, doing, doing turns out to have been a deception.

I have deceived myself.

I have deceived myself into thinking that somehow there is happiness at the end of a goal, no different from leprechauns, rainbows, and pots of gold. That success will somehow give my life meaning. That doing just one more thing will make me what I am not, that this time scratching the last item off my list will be enough.

I am restless, I am always on a journey, I am always looking for something. The goals, the accomplishments—they have all been intended to cure that, to make me into what I am not. All this time scrabbling and clawing and for what? To turn myself into someone I cannot be?

At first I am bitter and disillusioned. I had believed from the time I was very young that if only I could be a writer, I would be healed. But I’m not healed and can never be healed, and the knowing is like a wound from a brightly colored scorpion. Then I try to fix myself in another way. I meditate, I live in the present, I do yoga. It works for a little while, until I finally understand enough of what I am experiencing to realize the truth.

I am restless, I am always on a journey, I am always looking for something. And that is how I will always be.

I have spent a great deal of my life trying to unmake myself. Now, for the first time, I am embracing my restlessness. I am shedding the accretions from my life.

I am shaking out my cape.

Like the man says. Life is a leap of faith.

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You can buy my newest memoir, Just So You Know, at these retailers.

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Jennifer Lawler has been a writer-editor for more than twenty-five years and has published more than forty novels and nonfiction books. She is the founder of the online education company Club Ed LLC.