Still Holding It Together With Duct Tape

Well.

It’s been a while.

I’d love to tell you that I stopped blogging because I was off somewhere thriving, becoming the best version of myself, drinking enough water, getting eight hours of sleep, and generally behaving like a person who has figured out adulthood.

That would be a lie.

Mostly, I’ve been busy trying to figure out when exactly everyone decided I was qualified to be the grown-up in charge.

Because apparently I am now.

Somewhere along the way, I went from showing up to work and taking care of tiny humans to being expected to know things. Important things. Curriculum things. Planning things. Things with words like “intentional teaching experiences.”

I have never been the lead teacher in a classroom before.

The toddlers do not care.

They have not adjusted their expectations accordingly.

They still arrive every morning ready to lick things, climb things, steal toys from each other, reject perfectly acceptable food because it has personally offended them, and occasionally launch themselves toward furniture with absolutely no concern for the paperwork their actions will create.

Meanwhile, I’m supposed to have a plan.

Cool.

Cool cool cool.

And that has been a pretty accurate representation of life lately.

I’m supposed to have a plan.

For work.

For money.

For my future.

For what I want to be when I grow up, despite the increasingly troubling evidence that I am, in fact, already grown up.

Nobody warned me that adulthood would involve this much wondering whether you accidentally wandered into somebody else’s life and everyone is just too polite to tell you.

But somewhere between the toddler chaos and the existential crises, something else has been happening.

I’ve been making things.

A lot of things.

I’ve filled pages and pages with runes. I’ve worked on tarot and oracle cards. I’ve planned and designed and reorganized. I’ve built imaginary places and populated them with witches. I’ve written stories about seasons and friendship and memory and the strange ways people find—or lose—their way home.

Apparently, when my actual life feels like something I cannot control, I create worlds where I get to decide what happens next.

That realization probably deserves its own blog post.

Actually, a lot of things probably deserve their own blog posts.

Like becoming the grown-up in charge when you still occasionally look around for the grown-up in charge.

Like wondering, once again, what I want to be when I grow up.

Like discovering that creativity isn’t just something I do when I have spare time. Sometimes it’s the thing I reach for when everything else is too much.

And maybe that’s why I’m back here.

I don’t have some dramatic announcement.

I haven’t reinvented myself during my absence.

I haven’t cracked the code.

There will be no inspirational montage.

I’m still figuring things out.

I’m still making things.

I’m still questioning approximately 73 percent of my life choices.

I’m still occasionally convinced that everyone else received an Adulting Handbook that somehow got lost in the mail on its way to me.

And I’m still holding everything together with duct tape.

Which, now that I think about it, means this is probably exactly where I’m supposed to be writing.

So.

Hi again.

It’s been a while.

I have some stories to tell.