Pros and cons of a small(er) life

Over the last few years, I’ve carried the quiet, disorienting sense that my life has been reduced—pulled inward, pared down to something smaller than I once imagined, something I didn’t recognize at first as my own. I fought it. I grieved it. I raged against the narrowing, cried until the edges blurred, mourned the life that felt like it had nothing to do with what I’d been building for the first 38 years of my life.

And then, this past week, I heard it spoken back to me in a different voice, which happens often to me. Sometimes it just easier to see something through the lens of someone else’s experiences.

The woman I was interviewing (also living with Stage IV Metastatic Breast Cancer (MBC)) said, almost apologetically, that her life had gotten smaller too—more contained, more ordinary. But as she described it, the word didn’t land the way it had for me before. She spoke of investing deeply in her family, of centering her children and grandchildren, of turning inward in a way that felt intentional rather than diminished. She spoke of time—how she spends it, how she keeps it—and I found myself nodding, something in me loosening.

Maybe our lives aren’t meant to stretch endlessly outward.

Maybe they are meant to narrow—carefully, deliberately—until they point us toward what matters most.

Maybe focus is not loss, but refinement.

Maybe a smaller life is not a lesser one, but a truer one.

I think about my days now—how full they are in a different way. The driving, the shuttling, the ordinary rituals of getting my children where they need to be, of attending sports events, organizing carpools, making birthday celebration plans. The Zoom squares filled with faces I’ve come to love, the steady thread of connection within the MBC community—people doing sacred, exhausting work, holding each other up in the middle of so much uncertainty. It pulls at me, the suffering does. Some days it feels like a current I can’t quite step out of, that I must take time to learn to carry forward. Recovery time is a necessity these days, not a luxury, but I have the space to do that.

And when I have to pause—when I step away mid-conversation to take a child to the doctor or pick someone up from school—I can. I can say, I have to go, and I leave without guilt. There is a clarity in that, a reordering of what comes first.

There are moments that fill me in ways my old life never quite did: seeing a friend’s face light up on a screen, hearing about clean scans, negative pathology, treatments that are working, trials that carry a fragile, shimmering kind of hope. These small victories ripple outward. They matter. Being even a small part of helping someone I love access care, secure benefits, steady their life enough to actually live it—that feels like purpose in its most distilled form.

And when I choose to spend my time with people who have shed the unnecessary, who are no longer performing or striving or posturing, but simply being—people who have, by necessity or by wisdom, focused themselves on what matters most—that is when this life doesn’t feel like a loss.

That is when it feels full.

And still, the question lingers—

Is this smaller than the life I had before?

I remember my law office, the rhythm of it, the momentum. The networking groups, the sense of building something tangible, something recognized. I loved that life. I was good at it. And I walked away from it in 2017, when I was diagnosed with Stage IV metastatic breast cancer, knowing—suddenly and irrevocably—that presence mattered more than progress, that time with my family was not something to defer.

Still, the need for purpose didn’t disappear. It simply changed shape. It drew me, year after year, into advocacy, into this work of showing up for others in ways that feel both urgent and human. But it is not the same as building a career. It doesn’t follow the same metrics, doesn’t offer the same markers of success.

I don’t look toward retirement the way my husband does. His path stretches forward in a familiar arc—work, then rest, then a softening into quieter things. Mine… diverged. I am already living in a space beyond what the world calls “productive,” though my days are anything but empty.

He reminds me, gently, that what I do is not the same as “work.” And maybe he’s right.

But there is a strange and quiet freedom here, too.

A smaller life means I can choose—precisely, deliberately—how I spend what I have. I can say yes only to what feels aligned. I can step away from what doesn’t. I can build days not around obligation or expectation, but around meaning.

And maybe that’s the truth I’m still learning how to hold:

This life may be smaller by certain measures—

but it is also sharper,

clearer,

more intentional.

Less noise.

More truth.

Less reaching.

More holding.

And in that narrowing,

something essential remains—

something that, finally,

feels like mine.