Starting is the hardest part

August 31, 2024

I made this blog eleven months ago, and my life was completely different then. I was still in college – struggling, running out of time to get my degree before my financial aid ran out, but still there nonetheless. I’m not in school anymore, and I don’t have a Bachelor’s.

After leaving college, I moved in with my sister, which I hated doing, but it felt like a necessary stopgap on my way to finding somewhere I actually wanted to be. We got in one too many fights and she kicked me out, onto the streets.

I spent the next several months crashing on an internet friend’s couch, but the pattern of bad luck kept going, and things eventually soured. I’d found a stable place by that time, thankfully, but it still stung losing this friend. More importantly, the fact that it followed my failure at school and becoming homeless reinforced a simple idea in my mind: that I’d missed my chance to make something of myself, and the world wasn’t going to let me start over.

Now, let me be clear – everything is okay now. I live my life. I have permanent housing and nice roommates who I get along with, along with their cats. I work a remote job, go to drag shows. I got a tattoo the other day and paid my artist in homecooked lasagna. But it’s hard to believe that new beginnings are real, and that the good things will keep coming.

Writing is like that too. It’s hard to know where to begin when you haven’t done it for a while. And over the last year, my brain has not been focused on writing. In fact, I stopped writing around the time that I made this blog and only picked it up again in May. I started small, writing little observations about my day in Google Keep. And little observations turned into a few poems. And I submitted some old poems to journals.

The result? I’m published again.

Obviously that’s not the end, though. It genuinely is a new beginning, even if it doesn’t feel like one.

I’ve been sitting on this blog for a while – empty, gathering dust. I’ve felt bad, and have wanted to do something with it, but not knowing where to start. So here I am, starting. Anywhere is better than nowhere.

Here’s to the journey ahead. I hope it’s a long one.