When you’re a kid, adults love asking you what you want to be when you grow up.

The question makes sense when you’re seven.

Teacher.

Doctor.

Writer.

Veterinarian.

Astronaut.

Princess.

Nobody expects a detailed five-year plan.

Nobody asks the seven-year-old aspiring veterinarian whether she’s considered the benefits package.

You just pick something.

Then you grow up.

And at some point, apparently, you’re supposed to stop asking the question.

You’re supposed to have answered it.

Except I haven’t.

I am still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up.

Which would be considerably less concerning if I weren’t already grown.

I’ve had jobs.

I’ve learned things.

I’ve developed skills.

I’ve discovered things I’m good at and things I absolutely never want to do again.

And somehow I still haven’t arrived at the mythical point where I look around and think:

Yes. This is it. This is what I am going to do forever.

Maybe that point doesn’t exist.

I’m starting to suspect we’ve been sold a strange version of adulthood where choosing a career is treated like choosing a Hogwarts house.

You pick one.

That’s who you are now.

Please enjoy your matching scarf.

Except people change.

Lives change.

Priorities change.

Things that once seemed tolerable become exhausting.

Things that once felt impossible suddenly start looking interesting.

And sometimes you find yourself standing in the middle of a perfectly respectable life thinking:

I don’t know if I want this.

That’s a terrifying sentence.

Because knowing you don’t want something is not the same thing as knowing what you want instead.

I wish it were.

I wish dissatisfaction arrived carrying a folder labeled NEXT STEPS.

Instead it usually arrives at an inconvenient time, sits down beside you, and says:

“So…are we going to talk about this?”

Rude.

The truth is, I don’t know what comes next.

There are things I know.

I know I like creating.

I know I like writing.

I know I like turning ideas into actual things.

I know I can disappear into a project for hours when something catches hold of me.

I know there are parts of my current work that matter to me.

I also know there are parts that leave me wondering how long I can keep doing this.

Both things can be true.

Maybe that’s the part of career conversations we don’t talk about enough.

You don’t have to hate something for it to not be forever.

You don’t have to declare your entire life a mistake before you’re allowed to imagine something different.

And you don’t have to know exactly where you’re going before admitting you’d like to move.

So I’m asking the childhood question again.

What do I want to be when I grow up?

I don’t know.

Maybe a writer.

Maybe a creator.

Maybe something I haven’t found the name for yet.

Maybe several things.

Maybe the whole problem is thinking there has to be one answer.

For now, I’m paying attention.

To what exhausts me.

To what excites me.

To the things I keep returning to when nobody is telling me what I should be doing.

To the ideas that won’t leave me alone.

Maybe those things are breadcrumbs.

Maybe they’re just hobbies.

Maybe they’re both.

I don’t need to know yet.

Which might be the most grown-up answer I’ve ever given.

I’m still figuring out what I want to be when I grow up.

And apparently, growing up doesn’t disqualify me from asking.

I have a lot of notebooks.

This is not a confession.

I am not seeking help.

I am simply stating a fact.

There are notebooks for tarot.

Notebooks for astrology.

Notebooks for runes.

Notebooks waiting patiently for the approximately seventeen other things I have decided I need to learn.

There are stories.

There are cards.

There are planners.

There are ideas for rooms and books and decks and worlds that do not technically exist anywhere except inside my head.

Yet.

I make things.

And lately I’ve started wondering if there’s a reason I make so many things.

Because something interesting happens whenever life gets particularly loud.

I create.

When work overwhelms me, I come home and write about witches.

When I don’t know what I’m doing with my future, I organize information about something ancient into neat little pages.

When the real world feels chaotic, apparently I decide what I need is an entirely new fictional world with its own history, traditions, celebrations, magic, and problems.

Which is objectively hilarious.

Real life: overwhelming.

My brain: You know what would help? A PROJECT.

Thanks, brain.

But annoyingly, it does help.

There is something comforting about starting with an empty page.

Nothing has gone wrong yet.

There are no expectations.

There is only possibility.

I can write a word.

Draw a line.

Choose a symbol.

Invent a character.

Move something around.

Erase it.

Try again.

And slowly there is something where there wasn’t something before.

Maybe that’s the part I need.

Because so much of life doesn’t work that way.

You can’t erase a conversation and rewrite it more neatly.

You can’t reorganize people into places where they make more sense.

You can’t flip three pages ahead and see how a difficult season ends.

You can’t always fix what hurts.

But you can make something.

And sometimes making something is enough to remind yourself that not everything is outside your control.

I don’t think creativity fixes everything.

I wish it did.

But I think it gives me somewhere to put things.

Curiosity.

Frustration.

Grief.

Hope.

Restlessness.

The parts of myself that don’t have anywhere else to go.

Sometimes they become characters.

Sometimes they become cards.

Sometimes they become several pages of handwritten notes about ancient symbols because apparently that is how I relax now.

And sometimes they become words on this blog.

Maybe creating isn’t what I do after I’ve dealt with everything else.

Maybe creating is one of the ways I deal with everything else.

That feels different.

It makes all those half-filled notebooks and unfinished projects feel a little less like evidence that I can’t stick with anything.

Maybe they’re evidence that I keep reaching for something.

A blank page.

A new idea.

A world I haven’t built yet.

Something that says:

You may not get to decide everything that happens next.

But you still get to make something from it.

There are moments in life when you realize you have become an adult.

Not because you bought a house.

Not because you started contributing to a retirement account.

Not because you suddenly developed strong opinions about interest rates or orthopedic shoes.

No.

Sometimes you realize you are an adult because someone hands you responsibility for a room full of one- and two-year-olds and says, essentially:

You got this.

Do I?

Because I would like to see the evidence.

Somewhere along the way, I became the person who is supposed to know what we are doing today.

Not just keeping everyone alive. Not just changing diapers, serving snacks, wiping noses, breaking up tiny territorial disputes, and explaining for the four-hundredth time that our friends are not for biting.

Now there are lesson plans.

Curriculum.

Individual plans.

Intentional Teaching Experiences.

Mighty Minutes.

These are actual things.

Apparently I am supposed to know what they mean.

The funny thing is that toddlers remain completely unimpressed by my promotion to Person Who Is Supposed to Know Things.

I can have an activity carefully planned.

I can have developmental goals.

I can have materials prepared.

I can have an entire educational philosophy behind what we’re about to do.

And someone will immediately eat the crayon.

Welcome to early childhood education.

There is something deeply humbling about trying to facilitate a meaningful learning experience while another human being is lying facedown on the floor because you wouldn’t let them carry six cups at the same time.

And yet, somehow, this is my job.

More importantly, these tiny people are looking at me like I know what I’m doing.

Which is terrifying.

Because there have been days lately when I very much do not feel like I know what I’m doing.

There are days when everyone seems determined to get hurt at the exact same time.

There are days when nobody brings their listening ears.

There are nap times that make me reconsider every career decision I have ever made.

There are moments when I think, I cannot possibly be the person responsible for all of this.

And then somebody needs their shoe put back on.

Somebody wants a hug.

Somebody proudly brings me a toy like they have just discovered buried treasure.

Somebody finally does the thing we’ve been practicing for weeks.

And I realize that being the grown-up in charge apparently doesn’t mean feeling like the grown-up in charge.

Maybe nobody actually feels that way.

Maybe adulthood is mostly looking around for someone more qualified, realizing they’re not coming, and doing your best anyway.

Which is both comforting and horrifying.

I still don’t know exactly what I’m doing.

I’m learning the curriculum.

I’m learning the classroom.

I’m learning the kids.

I’m learning what works and what absolutely does not.

I’m learning that an activity you think will occupy toddlers for fifteen minutes can last approximately forty-three seconds.

I’m learning that silence is suspicious.

I’m learning that “gentle hands” may be the most repeated phrase in the English language.

And I’m learning that sometimes being the grown-up in charge means showing up the next morning after a terrible day and trying again.

Apparently that’s enough to start with.

Although I would still like to speak to whoever approved my promotion.

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.

Five years ago, if someone had told me what my life would look like today, I don’t think I would have believed them.

Five years ago, I wasn’t dreaming.

I was grieving.

Dad was still here, but his illness had already begun taking pieces of him away. Anyone who has watched someone they love become seriously ill knows that grief doesn’t begin the day they die.

Sometimes it begins the day you realize life will never be the same again.

I didn’t know then that four years ago this month, I would say goodbye to him.

I didn’t know there would be friendships I thought would last forever that would quietly become memories.

I didn’t know there would be days when I questioned everything I thought I knew about my future.

If I could sit down with the version of myself from five years ago, I don’t think I’d tell her not to cry.

I’d tell her to.

I’d tell her that loving deeply means grieving deeply.

I’d tell her that there isn’t a shortcut through heartbreak.

But I’d also tell her something else.

I’d tell her to hang on.

Because one day…

She’ll write books she never thought she’d have the courage to finish.

She’ll start a blog that reaches people she may never meet.

She’ll discover new passions simply because she’s curious enough to try.

She’ll fill notebooks with ideas, stories, dreams, and things she never imagined learning.

She’ll spend her days helping little children discover the world.

She’ll laugh again.

Not because she forgot.

Because life slowly, quietly, made room for joy alongside the grief.

That’s the part no one tells you.

Healing isn’t replacing what you’ve lost.

It’s learning that your heart somehow expands enough to carry both.

I still miss my dad.

There are still moments when I wish I could pick up the phone.

There are still dates on the calendar that hurt.

There are still people I miss for reasons that have nothing to do with death.

Those things didn’t disappear.

Neither did love.

But neither did hope.

Five years ago, I couldn’t imagine the person I’m becoming.

Not because she’s extraordinary.

Because she kept going.

She kept writing.

She kept learning.

She kept creating.

She kept believing there were still good chapters ahead, even when she couldn’t see them yet.

Maybe that’s all any of us are really doing.

Becoming someone our past selves would be proud to meet.

So today, if you’re standing where I once stood—wondering how you’ll survive the next week, the next month, or the next year—I want you to know something.

The version of you five years from now isn’t waiting on the other side because life suddenly became easy.

They’re waiting because you didn’t stop living.

One ordinary day at a time.

One difficult step at a time.

One hopeful choice at a time.

And one day, you’ll look back at the person you used to be with the same compassion you’d offer a dear friend.

Not because they had all the answers.

But because they kept going long enough to become someone they never imagined they could be.