I have restless legs syndrome.

Except in my brain.

Well, maybe that’s not medically accurate, but just like people with actual RLS, my neurological condition appears to produce an irresistible urge to move entire trains of thought around at all times.

The symptoms are usually triggered by resting.

Specifically:

lying down with my phone in my hand or sitting quietly with my laptop open.

At which point my brain suddenly announces:

What if we researched seventeenth-century monasteries, Round Top real estate listings, English climbing roses, how to fix your lawnmower after two Great Dane puppies ate the handle off the starter pull cord, documentary filmmaking, why I suddenly have both a chick-stache and a goatee, and whether grief physically alters cellular memory?

Immediately.

Right now.

Or death.

The discomfort temporarily improves with movement.

Or in my case:

opening forty-seven tabs.

Honestly, my internal life closely resembles that scene in The Big Chill where Glenn Close is lying awake after doing cocaine, absolutely vibrating with anxious existential energy while Kevin Kline is just trying to sleep.

If you’ve never seen it, the scene essentially consists of Glenn Close repeatedly climbing over him in bed to continue processing her thoughts out loud while he silently rolls over in the opposite direction trying to escape consciousness altogether.

She paces.

She worries her hands.

She stares into the middle distance like a woman attempting to solve the emotional failures of adulthood at three in the morning.

Then she climbs back over him again.

And again.

Each time Kevin Kline just rolls to the other side with the exhausted resignation of a man who understands he cannot defeat whatever psychological weather event is currently occurring in his wife’s nervous system.

That is essentially the relationship between me and my brain.

My nervous system is Glenn Close relentlessly crawling across the bed asking:

“Hey, I have an idea, what if we completely rethink our entire life at 3:17 a.m.?”

And the rest of me is Kevin Kline quietly whispering:

“Please. For the love of God. We have to sleep.”

Which is how I found myself recently researching medieval anchorites — women who voluntarily bricked themselves into tiny stone rooms in the Middle Ages so nobody could dump emotional labor in their laps or ask them to patiently guide a grown man through the terrifying complexities of basic communication ever again.

Honestly?

Visionary.

At any given moment there are approximately forty-seven tabs open in my browser and at least twelve open emotionally.

One is always grief.

Grief never really closes.

It just goes quiet for a minute while you compare harnesses online for your nine-month-old, hundred-pound Great Dane puppies and briefly wonder if saddles might honestly make more sense, or convince yourself you should start a documentary series at sixty because you watched one beautifully lit interview and suddenly became convinced you’re meant to “capture the emotional architecture of women’s interior lives.”

Which is an actual sentence I recently said out loud.

To my children.

Who continue to support me despite overwhelming evidence that I may be operating without adult supervision.

Anyway.

This particular corner of Love, Lannie is called Curated Chaos.

Because after sixty years on this planet, I have finally realized there’s a difference between being disorganized and being deeply, relentlessly alive.

Disorganized is forgetting where you put your keys.

Curated chaos is simultaneously:

writing a memoir,

researching medieval mystics,

rebuilding your life after divorce,

launching a newsletter,

watering hydrangeas,

and slowly realizing your actual life’s work may involve gathering women, stories, antiques, gardens, memory, and beauty into one enormous emotionally significant ecosystem.

Which honestly still feels possible.

The thing is, I spent twenty-six years building my business The Vintage Laundry.

And people thought I was renting china.

Which technically?

Sure.

But what I was really doing was building temporary worlds.

Beauty has always felt important to me.

Not in a fancy way.

In a survival way.

A lit candle.

A layered table.

A blue-and-white plate.

A good story told well.

Flowers from the garden arranged like someone still believes life can become lovely again.

That matters to me.

Maybe because for years I was holding together enormous amounts of grief, responsibility, and emotional over-functioning with what can only be described as aesthetically pleasing determination supported by a caffeine intake resembling a mild heroin addiction.

And now here I am at sixty becoming even more myself somehow.

Which feels deeply suspicious because apparently society expects women my age to quietly disappear by this point.

Become sensible.

At sixty, shouldn’t I be considering slowing down?

Shouldn’t I be speaking reverently about retirement funds and sensible footwear?

Shouldn’t I be less… ambitious?

Aren’t women my age supposed to stop beginning things?

Instead, I’m over here writing a memoir, launching literary projects, discussing documentary structures with my son, and researching how to build a place called Harp Weaver Manor — a place where the emotionally and artistically exhausted can gather around gardens, antiques, stories, memory, and candlelight while I attempt to turn grief into hospitality.

But I think I’m finally understanding something important:

The chaos was never the problem.

The shame about the chaos was the problem.

Because what looks messy from the outside is often just a person still becoming.

Still gathering.

Still imagining.

Still refusing emotional death.

There’s this type of YouTube channel I love where someone quietly restores old things.

An antique clock.

A ruined painting.

A vintage leather Chanel purse.

No screaming thumbnails.

No middle-aged man making the Home Alone face beside a giant red arrow like he’s just witnessed the second coming when really he’s just discovered a new iPhone feature.

Just:

care.

The slow sacred act of bringing something old back from neglect.

And one day it hit me that the reason I love those videos so much is because subconsciously I understood:

The thing being restored is me.

I’m the dusty object in the attic.

The cracked porcelain.

The painting someone nearly discarded because they thought it no longer mattered.

And maybe that’s what Curated Chaos really is.

Not failure.

Not lack of discipline.

Not evidence that I should finally “calm down” and become age-appropriate.

But evidence of ongoing restoration.

Evidence that some part of me still believes life can become larger, softer, stranger, more beautiful, and more meaningful than it currently is.

Which honestly feels like a form of rebellion now.

Women are often taught that the second half of life is about shrinking.

Be quieter.

Need less.

Dream smaller.

Become practical.

Instead, I seem to be accidentally building a literary ecosystem because I had feelings and a WiFi connection.

And maybe becoming yourself was never supposed to look tidy.

Maybe healing is not linear.

Maybe creativity is not linear.

Perhaps life itself was never supposed to be.

Possibly some of us are not here to become minimalist success stories with matching storage containers and emotionally regulated morning routines.

Maybe some of us are here to gather fragments and make mosaics from them.

Maybe the chaos was always part of the curation.

And it conceivable—

if we’re very lucky—

that we get to spend the second half of our lives becoming less dead.

One strange, beautiful unfinished thing at a time.

Love, Lannie

——

If you’d like to explore some of the other projects quietly growing alongside Love, Lannie, the links are included in the written version of this essay below.

Harp Weaver Manor. [LINK]

The Vintage Laundry Events. [LINK]

And eventually, Curated Chaos Collective.