Where are you now?

Recently, I got an urge to check in on all the old blogs I used to read--voices that used to get me through my work day. Many of these people are gone. Platforms are taken down, or simply not updated. I found myself distressed at the open endedness of it all.

What happened to them? I wondered.

What, since I last wrote, has happened to me? I wonder if anyone is wondering.

I have tried to answer that question. I keep coming back to this space, trying to fill the blank pages with words about my life and I find them, well stale.

Un-glamorous.

Quotidian.

Life happened to me, as it does to everyone. That's what I stumble over. Life. Happens. To EVERYONE. Call it the wisdom or cynicism of the 30s, but I have lost the swell of arrogance, the addiction to self validation that once drove me to share the minutia of my life.

Don't get me wrong. My life--its stories--are worth telling. But it's the kind of telling that is best shared with friends over a pint, with all of the rituals of modern oral tradition. They aren't stories for writing.

But I have others.

Which brings me to where we are right now. What is happening to me, right now: I am getting an MFA in Fiction, working with people who are generous, witty and kind. I have given my permission to play and stretch as a writer. It means writing, revising, then indulging in various inappropriate behaviors to fight off the specter of insecurity. It means picking up my hungover head off the pillow, putting on my big girl pants and doing it all again until the words feel right.

So if you've missed me, I'm here.

If you've googled "The rest of my life so far..." or "therestofmylifesofar.net", let me repeat: I am still here.

I still have a pair of chucks (although they are grey and not red). I still say the wrong things to people, wander streets at night, and scribble misadventures in leather bound journals where everyone is code-named with cheesy transparency.

I'm still writing about life, just differently. I call those scribbles drafts.

If you are one of those bloggers who used to get me through my day: thank you. Our moment has past (do people even have blogs any more?), but it was a darn good moment. Without your bravery, your vulnerability, your utter lack of filter or shame, I wouldn't be the writer that I am today.