I have had a busy mind recently. Life is moving fast, my friends are moving away, laying down plans in the foreign Antipodes, where Christmas happens under a baking sun and spiders as big as my hand live under your toilet seat.

I am living at home with my family in Dublin, reluctantly but also enjoyably unemployed, in a house that doesn’t quite have room for all of us. I feel like I’m the child who’s somehow managed to stay quiet enough in the living room that my parents have forgotten it’s my bedtime and haven’t ordered me to go to bed. I am living in that liminal space, trying not to take up too much room, trying not to enjoy those home comforts so much that I forget why I’d want to leave at all.

As I scramble to find a job that aligns with my interests, in an attempt to show good faith by even throwing in an application, I realize I’ve barely had time to think. It’s been a slightly emotionally tumultuous year. I’ve been rolling with the punches and carrying on with my usual pattern of using emotional self-repression as a trophy. Look how much I can deal with! Without you ever knowing!

But it’s also been a year where I’ve realized that such a practice wears you down over time. After breaking down in tears in front of a loved one, I realized that carrying that burden only proves to weaken you. It wasn’t for love of privacy; it wasn’t a testament of endurance or strength; it was fear of being vulnerable, fear of accepting that I couldn’t fix myself by myself.

I’ve been working on that, but it’s a bad habit that I’ve practiced very much recently, and I’m trying to enjoy the simple things again. Not having a job can be frustrating, miserable, self-deprecating, but it can also give us time to think, to pause, to take a step back and find ourselves on the map. Do we like where we’re going? I realized, in this cloud of uncertainty, that while I had no clue where I was going and where I’d find myself happy to end up, I had a good idea of which direction I needed to take. The rest would be uncertainty.

So here I am, writing this blog, hoping to make it a collection of thoughts and ideas. I want to focus on creating rather than consuming and sharing these with you. I want to be more mindful, more focused, more creative and more intentional with this platform. This is a step in that direction, an uncertain one, towards a path that I certainly know nothing about. I suppose that is how all great journeys start.