My day starts slowly now, and I want you to know that the slowness is on purpose. I have arranged my whole life around it. I work from home as much as I possibly can, specifically so that my mornings can begin gently, without a rush, without being thrown straight from sleep into someone else’s emergency. I sip my coffee. I play sudoku on my phone. I watch cat videos, which never get old. And Ziggy settles in next to me and I take my time with her, the warm weight of a cat against my side while the day waits patiently for me to be ready for it. That’s how it starts. Coffee and a cat and no hurry at all.

If you’d told the woman I used to be that this would one day be the shape of my mornings, she wouldn’t have believed you, because for most of my life a slow morning was not on the menu. There was always a crisis, always someone’s chaos to manage, always something on fire, sometimes literally. So let me tell you what a perfect day looks like for me now, on a weekend, when I’m free to build it however I want, because I think it says everything about where I’ve landed.

A perfect day might be the farmers market with one of my kids, wandering through the flowers and the produce with nowhere we have to be. Or poking around an antique store together, or flipping through the bins at the record store, because I love music and I love doing slow aimless things alongside the people I love most. It might involve foster kittens, playing with them and caring for them, the particular joy of tiny helpless creatures who need you and reward you with nothing but themselves. There might be a few small errands, or a little project on my condo, the one that’s mine, puttering around fixing it up the way you do when a place belongs to you. There might be some writing, like this. And in the summer, the perfect day ends at a comedy show or an evening concert out under a warm sky, my two great loves, laughter and music. Or if it’s a night in, I’ve got my shows, the comedy I love on Netflix and YouTube, SNL and the Daily Show and Bill Maher, or Traitors or Big Brother when I want the fun of a game, or something well-written, most of what Brett Goldstein touches. I wind down laughing, or at least entertained, and then I do it all again the next day, slowly.

Now, I know how this sounds. It sounds small. It sounds quiet, maybe even boring, a middle-aged woman with her coffee and her cat and her sudoku and her kittens and her comedy shows. But I need you to understand something, and it might be the most important thing in this entire book. This ordinary, quiet, uneventful day is the thing I fought for. It is the prize. For decades I did not get to have days like this. My days were court dates and hospital rooms and other people’s rage and emergencies I never saw coming. Peace was not something I could count on, ever. And so a day where nothing goes wrong, where no one is in crisis, where I get to move slowly through my own hours with a cat and a coffee and maybe my kids and maybe some kittens and definitely some laughter, that is not a lesser life. That is the whole point. That is what all the surviving was for. I didn’t claw my way through everything I’ve written about in these pages to arrive at something dramatic. I arrived here. At coffee and a cat and a slow Saturday. And I have finally learned enough to know that this is not boring.

This is everything. A quiet day, spent near the people and the creatures I love, in a home that’s mine, at a pace I chose, is the richest thing I own. It took me most of my life to get one. I don’t intend to ever call it boring again.