Right. So then, let's get the elephant out of the way immediately: I've been away, obviously. Doing things or not doing things, knitting things and not knitting things, teaching classes and... well, actually, this is pretty much the one constant.
I'm not trying to sell this as a blog comeback. Let's also be honest: I was never as connected to this blog in the same was I was to Livejournal back in the day. And you would have to blog regularly in order to have a comeback. This space played with the blogging trends of the day, branding and impossibly beautiful snapshots of life and I pretty much fail at all of that. It's just not what I do.
I've missed writing in a blog space. I recently went back through my Livejournal, a ridiculously thorough recounting of my undergraduate years and first years in the classroom, and was struck by just how (1) good it was to have these snapshots of a time that seems impossibly far away and (2) how much more connected I felt with life, how I used that space to think through the issues of my twenty-something life. There wasn't a ton of interaction, there were no brands hocked; just inquiries and attempting to think about how to approach them.
I'm approaching mid-stream (it sounds so much better than mid-life) and there's more than a few questions bubbling to the surface. More than anything, I want an audit trail of my thinking process as I seek to find my way through this maze. I've got, perhaps, a decade where a majority of life's opportunities are open to me; before I know it, those doors will be closing, slowly but surely. I want to be sure I am thinking about which doors I'm walking through and which I'm allowing to close.
Ultimately, I'm 34, single, childless, and without a house. This is not where I thought I would be at 34, yet it is where I find myself. I say this calmly, without a deficit perspective. There are elements I'd like to change (come on, perfect bungalow! I know you are out there!), elements I'm trying to figure out (can I put myself through the adoption process again?), and those elements completely out of my control (dating in your thirties is just weird). I don't want to leave these decisions to just happen. I didn't in my early twenties, why would I now?
So I'll probably come back every once in a while to think about life and possibly craft and possibly teaching. There will probably be better blogs about these things elsewhere.
