The whole point of this life I’ve drafted for myself, or so it seems to me more and more each day, is to simply get words onto paper.

That is why I am here. 

That is why I am jabbing the creativity fork into the idea wall socket and hoping for a spark. (Do not try that at home, it’s a little bit crazy after all.)

In the middle of 2023 I decided to walk away from an okay government job to take a break and re-evaluate. That break evolved into a simple realization, the insight into my own existence that I had been pursuing the thing I needed at the expense of the thing I wanted. I needed to pay my bills and earn a paycheque, but I wanted to build stuff, create, make, write something that endured longer than a strategy memo or a performance metrics report or even a short-lived website. I wanted to create art and music and stories and somewhere in all that just put lots and lots of words onto paper that had even merely a small glimmer of a chance of outliving me.

It is why I am here, jabbing around for that spark now, having turned our home into a single-income family and while I mostly live off of my savings to buy my coffee and digital ink supplies—not to mention all those forks.

This is my vibe: to write. 

To write all the time, because that’s what I get to do for a while, because that’s who I have chosen to be. It’s both what I want and what I need. And buried in there are the uncountable pieces of advice I’ve read over the decades, consumed in the years and months leading into this decision, and the same kinds of advice in which I’ve lathered my soul these past couple weeks as I jump into 2024 with a fork in hand, ready to jab around. That advice is this: just write then. That the point of it, is to do it. Go ahead. Think. Work. Feel. Immerse. Ponder. Wrangle the story, sure. But ultimately, just write. Put words onto paper.

So I am.