I quit drinking at 37, went vegan in my sixties, and converted my dining room into an art studio. Every time I remove something that used to define me, I find a person underneath who was waiting very quietly to be allowed to exist.

Last spring, I dragged my dining room table into the hallway. It took me forty-five minutes, two knee braces, and a conversation with myself that went something like: You are seventy years old and you are removing a perfectly good table from a room where nobody eats. Nobody had eaten there in over a year. Not since my weekly vegan dinners moved to the kitchen counter, where the light is better and the conversations are closer. The table had become a surface for mail, watercolor paper, and a slow accumulation of things I was keeping because getting rid of them felt like admitting something I wasn't ready to admit.

But I was ready. I'd been ready for a while.

By the end of that weekend, I'd set up two easels, reorganized my paint supplies into mason jars I'd been saving since Ray was alive, and hung a sheet of clear plastic over the window to protect the wall from splatter. My daughter called while I was rearranging brushes. She said, "You got rid of the dining room?" Like I'd demolished a wing of the house. Like a room with a table in it was structural.

I told her I didn't get rid of anything. I made room.

The first removal: the bottle

I quit drinking at 37. I've written about this before—about how the hardest part wasn't the craving but discovering that every social tradition in my family ran through a bottle—and I'll probably write about it again because that was the first time I understood something I've spent the rest of my life learning: you cannot separate who you are from what you do every day, and if what you do every day is slowly killing you, the person underneath has no air.

At 37, I was a single mother teaching eighth-grade English in a town where the teachers' lounge had a running joke about who was bringing wine to Friday grading sessions. I was the funny one. The one who'd open a bottle of something cheap and say, "This pairs well with C-minus essays." People loved that version of me. She was easy to be around. She asked nothing of anyone except that they laugh.

When I stopped drinking, I didn't just lose the habit. I lost the personality I'd built around the habit. The jokes didn't land the same way sober. The Friday sessions felt interminable without the thing that made them bearable. People said, "You're so different now," and they didn't mean it as a compliment. They meant: I liked the other one better.

Research backs this up in ways I didn't have language for at the time. A 2019 study in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that people react negatively to others who make identity-consistent moral changes—like quitting drinking or changing their diet—because those changes implicitly threaten the observer's own self-concept. In other words, it wasn't that my colleagues were cruel. It was that my sobriety held up a mirror they hadn't asked for.

But here's the thing nobody tells you about removing a defining feature of your identity: there's a lag. A gap. You take the bottle away and there's just—space. And the space is terrifying because you don't yet know who fills it. For about a year after I quit, I felt like I was walking around with a hole in the middle of my chest where a personality used to be.

The person who eventually showed up in that space was quieter. She was also more honest, which made her harder to love at dinner parties but easier to live with at 3 a.m.

The second removal: the meat, the dairy, the story I told about both

I went vegan in my sixties, after watching Ray die slowly from Parkinson's. I don't claim the two things are causally linked the way a scientist would. What I know is that watching someone you love lose control of their body—the tremors, the rigidity, the way his face stopped showing what he was feeling even when I knew he was feeling everything—changes your relationship to what you put into your own body. It changes what you're willing to accept as normal.

I grew up in a house where food was fuel and you didn't question it. My father worked at Sears for eighteen years. My mother sewed alterations in the evenings to cover what his paycheck didn't. In lower-middle-class families like mine, meals were not about choice. They were about what was affordable and what was fast. I carried that mentality well into my fifties—food is not something you have feelings about; food is something you eat so you can do the other things.

Going vegan meant dismantling that story. It meant admitting that food is something I have feelings about, and that those feelings matter, and that choosing differently isn't a luxury—it's a form of attention. Attention to my body, to what I now understand about inflammation and neurodegeneration, to the fact that Ray's doctors never once asked what he ate.

A 2023 review in Frontiers in Nutrition examined the links between plant-based dietary patterns and reduced risk of neurodegenerative diseases, and while I'm not naive enough to think a bowl of lentils would have saved Ray, I am honest enough to say: I wish someone had talked to us about it. I wish the conversation had been on the table alongside the prescriptions.

What surprised me about going vegan wasn't the food itself—I've always been a decent cook, and Singapore has more plant-based options than most people imagine. What surprised me was the social cost. Not hostility, exactly. More like—a kind of quiet withdrawal. My daughter started apologizing for me at restaurants. My son stopped suggesting places for us to eat together and started suggesting walks instead. The loneliest moment isn't being alone—it's being surrounded by people who only know the version of you that made their life easier, and realizing you helped build that version yourself.

But again: underneath the loss, something was waiting. The woman who hosts weekly vegan dinners in her Singapore apartment, who experiments with turmeric and black pepper and cashew cream, who eats alone at hawker centers without apology—that woman was always there. She just needed the other one to step aside.

The third removal: the room that said "proper adult"

The dining room was the last thing to go, and in some ways it was the hardest, because it wasn't a substance or a diet. It was a symbol. A dining room says: I am a person who hosts. I am a person with a life that looks a certain way. I have arrived at an arrangement that works.

Except it didn't work. It hadn't worked in years. I was painting watercolors on the kitchen counter with a towel over the wood because I was afraid of staining the surface, while an entire empty room sat ten feet away doing nothing. The absurdity of that only hit me after I started a meditation practice and realized how much of my life was organized around preserving spaces I didn't actually use—physical, emotional, relational.

Research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by psychologists at UC Davis found that adults who actively engage in identity-consistent activities—hobbies, creative pursuits, practices that reflect who they are now rather than who they used to be—report significantly higher well-being and sense of purpose. The study calls this "self-concordance," but I call it something simpler: letting go of what you've been holding onto decades longer than you should.

My art studio is not impressive. I want to be clear about that. I have arthritis in both hands. My watercolors look like what they are—the work of someone who started late and paints because it's the only hour of the day when her mind goes completely silent. The easels are cheap. The lighting is imperfect. There is a paint stain on the floor that I've stopped trying to clean because it looks—to me—like evidence that someone lives here. Really lives here. Not just maintains a house that looks like a life.

What the removals taught me

Here is the pattern I didn't see until I'd done it three times: every identity I've let go of was, at the time I formed it, a survival strategy. Drinking was how I socialized in a world that didn't know what to do with a single mother who was also exhausted. Eating whatever was affordable was how I kept a household running on a teacher's salary for thirty-two years. Maintaining a proper dining room was how I signaled to myself and everyone else that I had made it—that the girl from small-town Pennsylvania with the seamstress mother had arrived at something stable.

Each of those strategies worked. Until it didn't. And the not-working always came quietly, not with a crash but with a growing sense of wearing a coat that no longer fit but that I kept putting on every morning because I'd forgotten I was allowed to take it off.

Research on identity transition in later adulthood suggests that older adults who successfully navigate major identity shifts tend to have one thing in common: they interpret loss of a former self not as diminishment but as clarification. Not "I am less." But "I am more specifically myself."

That's as close as I can get to describing it.

The person who was waiting

She paints badly and eats well. She lives in Singapore in an apartment that smells like linseed oil and ginger. She goes to bed early and wakes up to write before the arthritis kicks in. She doesn't drink, doesn't explain her food choices at restaurants, and doesn't own a dining room table.

She also doesn't apologize for any of it. Which is, I think, the real removal—the one that made all the others possible. Not the alcohol, not the animal products, not the furniture. The apology. The constant, low-grade performance of being okay with things that weren't okay, so that other people could remain comfortable.

My granddaughter visited last month. She's eight. She walked into the studio, looked at the paint jars and the half-finished landscapes and the stain on the floor, and said, "This is the best room in your house."

She wasn't being polite. She was being accurate. It's the room where nobody is pretending.

I spent most of my life building identities that would protect me—from poverty, from judgment, from the particular vulnerability of being a woman alone in a world that doesn't quite trust women who choose to be alone. And those identities did protect me. They kept me employed and married and socially acceptable and very, very tired.

Every time I remove one, the tiredness lifts a little. And underneath it—quiet, patient, unsurprised—there she is. Whoever she's been this whole time. Holding a paintbrush. Waiting for the room.