Well, I missed writing more than a day or a month. I missed more than a year. I flat out stopped writing for the public.

If you'd asked me in the middle of it, I probably would have blamed being busy, or tired, or a dozen small things that were technically true. The real reason was quieter than that. I lost the motivation to do just about everything, including this.

Some of it was chemical. I was on medication for depression that did what it needed to do for the parts of me that needed steadying, and it also flattened whatever initiative I had left. Hard to write your way toward anything when the part of you that reaches for a pen has gone quiet too.

Some of it wasn't chemical at all. My previous site, Happy Heading Nowhere, stopped sounding like me. I'd sit down to write in that voice and it felt like wearing someone else's coat. I didn't know yet what I actually sounded like, so mostly I just stopped saying things out loud.

I didn't decide to come back to writing so much as get pulled back, slowly. No single morning where the fog lifted and I picked the pen back up. More like it thinned a little at a time, until there was enough clear space to notice I still had things to say.

BTWN is what came out the other side. Not really a rebrand. More of an admission. I've spent most of my life between one thing and the next, between who I was and who I'm becoming, between the plan and whatever actually happened instead. Between ok and not ok.

Happy Heading Nowhere always implied I'd get somewhere eventually. BTWN doesn't promise that. It just says where I actually am, which is somewhere in the middle, still.

I used to think I needed to be ok before I had permission to say anything. I don't believe that anymore. Some days I still don't feel ok. I'm starting to think I might never feel ok in the tidy, done-with-it way I used to picture.

I'm not writing because I got past it. I'm writing because I stopped waiting to.