The reckoning and the lazy Susan

There’s a two-tier lazy Susan on its way to my door right now and I am unreasonably excited about it.

It’s for my coffee station. For the vitamins.

Let me back up.

This morning I woke up early, earlier than I needed to, sat down in my cozy spot with my coffee, and before I even finished the first cup I had built myself a personalized fitness tracking app. Full workout plan. Supplement checklist. Weight tracker. Meal plan. The whole thing.

I named it Tracy’s Fit Lab.

I built it for me. Not for who I used to be, not for some aspirational version of me who never needs rest. For me, right now, at this age, in this season. It tracks water because apparently I need a lot more of it than I used to, which is both annoying and hilarious. It’s flexible. It’s simple. There’s a button for morning stretching, a pretty pink box that just says “I stretched today” — no rigid rep counts, no guilt on the days I only want to yawn and reach for the ceiling. Just a gentle, honest check-in with myself.

That, it turns out, is exactly what I needed to build.

That feeling is the thing I actually want to write about today.

I have missed feeling excited.

Not happy exactly. Not okay. Not getting through it. Excited. The kind of excited that makes you build a fitness app before breakfast because your brain is just on and your heart is in it and something in you has quietly, finally, decided.

Here’s what I haven’t said out loud yet, or maybe I have, just not like this.

My dad died recently. And grief, real grief, has a way of putting you face to face with things you’ve been avoiding. Not just the sadness. The inventory. Who you are. What you’re doing with the time you have. What you’ve been telling yourself you’ll get to eventually.

I felt my own humanity in a way I haven’t before. My own end-of-life, sitting right there across the table, not threatening. Just present. Real in a way it had never quite been real before.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, the tears, the quiet, the processing, my gut said something.

It’s time. No more excuses. Take care of yourself.

Not from a place of fear. From a place of love, actually. The same love that was grieving my dad was also, quietly, fiercely, turning toward me.

So I’m doing the research. I’m learning things I haven’t needed to know before, about supplements, about what my body needs now. Because things have shifted. I am not the woman I was at 40, or even 50. My body has different needs, different rhythms, different asks. And somewhere in the grief I made peace with that. Not reluctantly. Actually made peace with it.

I’m making different choices. Better ones.

That’s the reckoning. Not dramatic. Not a rock bottom moment. Just a quiet, grief-softened woman sitting with herself long enough to finally hear what her gut had been saying all along.

And now? Now I have a fitness app I built before breakfast. Seven supplements in gummy and dissolving form because I know myself well enough to know that’s the only way I’ll actually take them. A meal plan. An exercise plan. A prescription. And a two-tier lazy Susan on its way to my coffee station so that every single morning, when I sit down with my coffee in my cozy spot, the first thing I see is evidence that I chose myself today.

That’s what excited feels like when it comes back after a long time away.

It doesn’t announce itself. It just quietly shows up, in a cart, in an app, on a Saturday morning that starts at 5 a.m. because you couldn’t sleep because you were too busy becoming.

I’ll take it.

I’ll take all of it.