Letters to Viv: The Part They Skip in the Glow-Up Story

A letter from the part no one posts about, the middle where nothing is fully broken, and nothing is fully built.

Letters to Viv
Open, soul-packed letters to the kind of human I write for: the curious, creative, exhausted by the hustle, and craving something more. I’m writing to you (and me).

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Dear Viv,

I walked into the church because it was there.

That’s usually how it starts with me. An open door, a bit of history, a quiet place to sit that isn’t a café and doesn’t require ordering something.

Bordeaux outside was fully alive. Sun on stone, people spilling out of cafés, someone arguing passionately in French like it’s an Olympic sport that they’ve been training for years. Inside, it was still. The cool air instantly gave me goosebumps. High ceilings and stained glass in the windows. The smell of incense wafts in the air.

I sat down out of habit. Irish Catholic muscle memory. Be quiet. Be respectful. Don’t make a scene.

Église Saint-Louis-des-Chartrons de Bordeaux | Photo: Tanya Fraser

And then, of course, I made a scene.

One minute I’m sitting there like a normal person on a Wednesday afternoon, the next I’m crying like I’ve been holding something for months and my body just went… “right, that’s enough of that.” Face scrunched, shoulders in, suddenly very aware that I am alone in a church in France, having a full emotional collapse beside a candle stand.

Very glamorous. Very me of late.

It wasn’t about ONE thing. It never is.

Eighteen years with someone doesn’t quietly pack up and leave when you tell it to. It lingers in habits, in memory, in the way your brain still reaches for someone who isn’t there and finds air. There’s a whole history in your body that doesn’t care about your new life plan.

And now it’s just me.

Which, on the good days, feels extraordinary. I wake up when I want. I go where I want. I write, I wander, I meet people who expand me in ways I didn’t know I needed. There are moments I’m walking through a city thinking, “How is this my life? I asked for this and it actually arrived. Wild.”

And then there are the days like that church.

Where it gets quiet enough to hear the question underneath everything.

Where do I belong?

I mean it honestly, not dramatically. Because I am out here meeting incredible people, having conversations that stretch me, living in places I once only pinned on a map. And still, no home base, no partner, nobody to turn to at the end of a long day and say, “Hey, can you just hold this with me for a minute? I’m tired.”

Everything lands with me now. Every decision, every 3 am doubt spiral when the brain decides to host a highlight reel of all possible life mistakes going back to approximately 2003.

It’s a lot, Viv. It’s genuinely a lot.

We love a good before-and-after. The heartbreak and then the glow-up, the struggle and then the montage where everything comes together to a decent soundtrack.

Nobody posts the bit in the middle where you’re sitting in a church in Bordeaux trying to bargain with the universe for a sign, any sign, that you’re not quietly making a mess of your own life. That you’re actually building something. That this will make sense eventually.

I sat there, wiping my face with the back of my hand like a child, thinking, “What am I actually doing?”

And the church, being a church, said nothing.

Just the sound of my own breathing and the distant noise of Bordeaux getting on with its Wednesday without me.

So I sat with it. All of it. The not knowing, the not belonging, the exhaustion of being the only person responsible for every single thing in your own life. I let it land where it landed.

And then something in me settled into the decision to keep moving anyway, which at this point is the closest thing to faith I’ve got.

This is the middle, Viv. The part no one frames. The part where you genuinely cannot tell if you’re becoming who you’re meant to be or just very committed to a questionable life choice with good Instagram locations.

I’m working harder than I ever have, building something that doesn’t fully exist yet, with no immediate proof that it’s working and no one handing out gold stars for effort. Some days that feels powerful. Other days it feels like pushing a boulder uphill in flip-flops, in the rain, while someone nearby orders a glass of Bordeaux and has a lovely time.

And I’m trying to be patient with the pace of it, which, if you know me, is its own form of extreme sport.

I think about Future Tanya sometimes.

She’s somewhere down the line, looking back at this version of me in that church, eyes puffy, asking for directions from the ceiling and the stained glass. And I don’t think she’s rolling her eyes.

She’s smiling. The full, earned, I know exactly what that cost you kind of smile.

You stayed in it. You felt the full weight of it and you didn’t fold, didn’t shrink back into something smaller because it felt safer. You kept going even when you had no proof it was going anywhere.

Good on you, girl.

Look at us now.

XO,

Tanya

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