What I Learned About Finding Calm in Structure When Everything Else Felt Too Big
There is a period in my life I have been thinking about more than usual lately. It wasn’t the most dramatic period. Nothing collapsed dramatically or ended with a clear turning point I could point to later and say: that was when things changed. It was quieter and harder than that. The kind of season where you look back and realize you were in far more pain than you were letting yourself acknowledge at the time, because acknowledging it fully would have required sitting still with something too large to sit still with.
I had lost Bruce.
If you’ve been reading these letters for a while you may have heard me mention him. He was a Labrador Retriever and he was the most extraordinary dog, the first dog I ever raised from a puppy, and my heart dog in every sense of that word. After I was diagnosed with Meniere’s disease, Bruce became my alert dog. He would stand firm when I stepped out of the shower so I had something solid to lean against if the dizziness came. He would pick things up off the floor and hand them to me when the world was spinning. He knew what my phone was and would bring it to me. He could close doors, put clothes in the washer and pull them out of the dryer into the basket.
He was a gift from my granddaughters and brought experiences I never expected. We did agility and obedience and dances and tricks and somewhere in all of that I became something I had not been before, a woman who understood what it meant to work in complete partnership with another living creature who was paying attention to her every single moment of every single day.
When I lost him, I lost my constant companion. I also lost my safety net, the one who knew before I did, the one who stood firm when I needed something to stand against. Those are two very different losses that arrived in the same moment, and together they left a silence in the house that was louder than almost anything I had ever heard.
There was also a move I didn't want. A period when my household was divided by Covid in ways that sometimes felt impossible to bridge — two people who loved each other looking at the same world and seeing something completely different, and not quite knowing how to acknowledge each other across that divide.
And underneath all of it, something quieter that I hadn't fully named yet.
My son had left home some years before for the Army and settled in Georgia. With my work and travel filling the space he left behind, the home-cooked meal and any sort of family dining had disappeared so gradually I hadn't noticed it going. Restaurant food, fast food, processed everything. The kitchen was never dirty and no one noticed. My gut was suffering for it in ways I was only beginning to understand, and the rest of me wasn't far behind.
My brother Eric has always had a gift for the dare delivered so casually you almost didn't notice it had a hook in it.
He had come to visit from Colorado and we were sitting in an Indian restaurant, a piano player in the background, sipping cocktails they light on fire, the kind of dinner that feels unhurried over too soon. I made a big announcement about getting an Instant Pot and joked about the first time I'd opened it thinking I was going to blow the house up. He raised an eyebrow and grinning like a cheshire cat, he made a joke about it probably never being used again.
And then he looked at me across the table and said: I dare you to cook in that thing every night for a year.
He thought he was teasing me about a kitchen appliance. He had no idea what he was giving me.
I took that dare. Not because I had a plan, or because I suddenly felt motivated, or because I believed at that moment that anything was about to change. I said yes because subconsciously, I was looking for somewhere to put myself, and a dare is a structure, and structure, I was about to learn, is sometimes exactly what a grieving, burned-out woman needs most.
I called it my Instant Pot Journey and I chronicled every meal on Instagram. I tagged Eric in each post so he would know when I ate squash or something else he would never in a thousand years believe I would voluntarily put in my mouth. He became my unwitting accountability partner.
But something else was also happening.
I cooked from only three cookbooks. I planned my recipes at the beginning of each week. I made lists and went to the grocery store with purpose for the first time in longer than I wanted to admit. I stood in my kitchen and I chopped vegetables. I learned what ghee was. I cooked with nutritional yeast, which I would not have been able to identify in a lineup six months earlier. I tried foods I remembered hating as a child and discovered that my palate, left to its own devices, had apparently grown up without consulting me.
The processed food disappeared without me making a dramatic decision about it. It simply stopped fitting the rhythm I was building. And something I hadn’t expected: I was coming home. I hadn’t understood until I was standing in that kitchen with a cookbook in my hand that I had been grieving the kitchen itself, the act of cooking for someone, the domestic rhythm I had always dismissed as ordinary until it was gone. The Instant Pot year gave it back to me. Not as obligation but as something I was choosing, every night, for myself.
My gut started to settle. The unnamed inflammation that had been quietly controlling me began to quiet. I had more energy, not bucketloads, but enough to notice. Enough to feel the difference between surviving a day and actually living one.
It was around this time that I started Happy Juice.
I don’t think the timing was a coincidence. I had already begun paying attention to what I was putting into my body, already begun to understand that my gut and my mood were in a conversation I hadn’t been monitoring very carefully. Happy Juice fit into what I was already building. The gut-brain connection I would later spend years learning to explain and teach was something I was living my way into, one recipe at a time, without yet having the language for what was happening.
I finished the year. Every night, as promised.
Eric knew I had done it. He was proud I was feeding my husband again. And that still makes me laugh.
I lost Eric fourteen months ago.
The Facebook memories still come. I’ll be going about an ordinary morning and one will surface, a squash post, some improbable vegetable, Eric’s comment underneath it, and I will stand there in my kitchen and feel the whole year come back at once. The piano player in the Indian restaurant. The cocktail. The dare across the table. Him watching from Colorado, astonished and proud, not knowing he was witnessing a woman finding her way back to herself one meal at a time.
He was doing this with me across the miles. But, he was doing so much more than that.
The journey didn’t end when the year did. It hasn’t ended now. Every time a memory surfaces, every time I make something in that pot, every time I stand in my kitchen choosing something real over something convenient, Eric is still in it somehow. Still daring me. Still watching. Still commenting from somewhere I can’t tag him back.
I think that’s what it means when love becomes structure. When something someone gave you without knowing they were giving it becomes the rhythm you live inside.
That is not nothing. That is, I have come to believe, quite a lot.
If You’re in the Middle of Something Hard Right Now
Sometimes the way back to yourself isn’t through the hard thing directly. Sometimes it’s through the Tuesday night dinner.
I think about that year a lot when I talk to women who are somewhere in the middle of something hard. The grief that doesn’t have a clean shape. The burnout that arrived so gradually you can’t name exactly when it started. The period where you are doing the minimum and calling it fine and hoping something shifts without being sure what to shift toward.
I don’t always say, "Start with the Instant Pot."
But I do say: find the thing that is small enough to hold in your hands and structured enough to give your mind somewhere to be. It doesn’t have to be cooking. It could be gardening or walking the same route at the same time every morning or learning something new enough to require your full attention. What matters is the rhythm. The small repeated decision to show up for something modest and specific and yours.
What I know now that I didn’t know in the middle of it is that the things we carry can show up in the body too. The grief I carried, the feeling of being unheard, the exhaustion of a household divided, these things were affecting me long before I had language for them. They showed up in my gut, in my energy, in the flatness I was calling fine.
The Instant Pot year didn’t fix any of that. What it did was give me a structure gentle enough to survive inside while the harder work happened at the pace it needed to happen. It gave me something to look forward to at the end of a day.
It gave me Eric when I needed my little brother.
And the Facebook memories that still come on ordinary mornings, still making me stand in my kitchen with a squash post and a comment from Colorado and the whole beautiful, dare of it, those are ours. They always will be.
Until next time —
Nelea R. Lane
a/k/a The Happy Juice Chick Founder The Stress Less Era
Available by Text: 936-209-7222
If you’ve been carrying more than you realized and wondering where to start, the Stress Signal Assessment can help you identify which signal may be asking for the most support right now. It takes about two minutes. No diagnosing. Just a little clarity about what your body may be trying to tell you.
This is part of the Letters from the Stress Less Era series, where I write about what I’ve lived, what I’ve learned, and the things women often carry long before we understand how much they’re affecting us.
