So many times I’ve opened up this window and stared blankly at the blinking cursor. What do I even have to say anymore? What’s the point in blogging when, let’s be honest, I’m not making forward movement on any of my “real” writing goals? The pitch for Show Me Your Brave sits idly on my desktop, never having been completed. I haven’t shared any of the submissions there in ages, and they’ve stopped coming in because the project has been all but abandoned. The ideas for works of fiction roll through my brain getting duller and duller, like the seaglass I obsessively collect each time we visit Newfoundland.

What am I even doing with my life?

Divorce simultaneously knocked the wind out of me, and propelled me forward. It was exactly the ass kicking I needed to recognize that I had lost myself somewhere along the marriage path. But now, nearly three years into this new life, I feel I’ve strayed again.

I miss me. I miss my words and my passions, I miss the friends who left me when my shit hit the fan. I miss the careless trust I placed in others to hold me together. I miss the direction I thought I had. I miss the dreams.

There’s no reason for my aimlessness. Life has settled into a beautiful routine again, and I am happy. But I am also so goddamn busy, it feels like I once again never have the time to focus on, well, anything. Scheduling in a wax appointment was difficult. How pathetic is it that I struggled to find a window of time to “enjoy” personal care?

I felt empowered by my rawness just a couple years ago, my edges were sharp. But now, like that glass chucked carelessly away, I am soft. Where the tides roll, I follow. No real direction, no impact of my own, it seems.

And as “busy” as I feel I am, I find myself scrolling endlessly through feeds on social media, evaluating the lives of the people to whom I am connected… feeling cripplingly disconnected.

I feel like I need to give myself a shake.

Everything hangs on the words stuck inside me.