Life Apparently Had Other Plans

Day 204 – June 15, 2026

There is something almost rude about the way life keeps happening when you are still trying to recover from something. You can be sitting there attempting to process the largest emotional catastrophe of your existence and life is like, great, anyway, there are emails to answer, a dog that would like to go outside, laundry that has somehow reproduced overnight, and approximately seventeen things you forgot you agreed to do.

I used to resent that a little. Maybe more than a little. There were days when I wanted everything to stop long enough for me to catch up. Stop moving. Stop asking things from me. Stop requiring decisions. Stop presenting new problems before I had finished dealing with the old ones. Apparently the universe does not offer bereavement leave from being alive. Rude.

But lately I have started wondering if that relentless forward motion is also part of what has been saving me. Because my life is getting busy again. Not performatively busy. Not the kind of busy people brag about while secretly hoping someone asks them how they possibly manage everything. Actual busy. Ideas. Writing. Conversations. Possibilities. Things that require my attention because they might turn into something.

For a long time, most of my energy went toward getting through the day. That was the job. Wake up. Get through it. Try not to spiral. Take care of Roger. Attempt to eat something. Attempt to sleep. Repeat until somehow another week had gone by. There is nothing particularly exciting about survival when you are actually doing it. It is mostly repetitive and exhausting.

Then somewhere along the way, something started changing. I started writing more. Then I started caring about what I was writing. Then I started caring about where it went. Then other people started caring too. That last part still feels strange.

Wild Poise began as this place I needed. I was not sitting around developing a grand business strategy or drawing diagrams on a whiteboard like some woman in a commercial who owns seven perfectly coordinated pantsuits. I needed somewhere to put things. Thoughts. Anger. Questions. Stories. Whatever was bouncing around inside me and refusing to shut up. So I wrote, and then I wrote again, and then I kept going.

Somewhere in all that writing, people started showing up. Actual people. Reading. Returning. Clicking through things. Spending time there. Apparently enjoying themselves, which feels like an important feature of a website. I still catch myself looking at the numbers and thinking there must be some mistake. Like surely these people meant to go somewhere else and accidentally wandered into Wild Poise while searching for gardening supplies. Yet they keep coming back.

And now other things are beginning to happen too. Conversations about writing. Potential work. People asking questions about what I do. Opportunities that did not exist a few months ago because, frankly, neither did most of the work that made them possible.

That is what keeps catching me off guard. I built something while I thought I was falling apart. Not elegantly. Not intentionally at first. Certainly not according to a five year plan. But I built it.

There are more than two hundred journal entries here now. There are blog posts and ideas and pieces of myself spread across this site. There is a voice here that did not exist in quite this way before I started. Mine. That sounds obvious until you understand how long I spent feeling disconnected from it.

Trauma does strange things to your sense of self. You can know exactly who you are and still feel like somebody came through and knocked all the furniture over. Everything technically still belongs to you, but nothing is where you left it. Writing has been a way of putting some of it back. Not where it was. Some of it does not belong there anymore. But somewhere.

I think that is part of why the idea of building again matters so much to me right now. Building does not mean restoring everything exactly as it used to be. I am not trying to reconstruct some museum exhibit of my old life. There are things I want that I did not want before. Things I know now that I did not know then. Things I will never tolerate again. Things I am much less afraid to say. And, perhaps most importantly, I have become considerably less interested in asking permission.

That one took a while. There is a version of life where you spend an incredible amount of time waiting for someone else to confirm that you are allowed to do the thing you already know you want to do. Allowed to write. Allowed to call yourself a writer. Allowed to build something. Allowed to take yourself seriously. Allowed to want more.

Eventually you realize there is no committee. Nobody is coming with an embossed certificate announcing that you are now sufficiently qualified to begin your own life. You just start. Sometimes badly. Sometimes terrified. Sometimes with absolutely no idea what you are doing. And then one day you look behind you and there is a whole damn thing sitting there.

Wild Poise is starting to feel like that. A whole damn thing. Not finished, obviously. My brain would like everyone to know we have approximately nine million ideas remaining. But real.

And I want to know what happens if I stop treating it like something I accidentally made while surviving and start treating it like something I am deliberately building.

That thought scares me a little, which probably means I should pay attention to it. Because there is risk in wanting something. Once you admit you want it, you can fail at it. Very inconvenient. But there is also something worse than failing at something you wanted, and that is never finding out what it could have become.

I have already spent too much time letting fear make decisions for me. Some of that fear was earned. Some of it kept me alive. But fear does not get permanent voting rights.

So life apparently had other plans. While I was busy figuring out how to survive what happened it quietly started handing me things to build. A website. A body of work. A voice. Possibilities. Maybe even a future that looks different from anything I had planned.

I do not know where any of it goes yet. That used to terrify me. Now it is starting to feel kind of exciting.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And apparently a growing to do list in both.