Somehow, it’s two years after my last post and I find myself again thinking about this blog. I always build this blog up to be some big thing in my head, think that every post needs to be profound and that I can’t put anything less than perfection on the internet.

Perfection stood in the way for so long when it came to doing many things in my life. I put off getting a professional certification because I thought I had to know everything backward and forward before I could sit for the exam. I put off moving to a new city because I was always waiting for the right moment to make moving as easy as possible. I put off writing my stories because I thought if I just absorbed enough craft books, then I could write something worth it the first time out the gate.

For every single thing I put off and waited for, I eventually just had to start from zero on all of them.

In 2024, I finally did sit down and I studied and I took practice tests. I was bad at it! And then I was less bad as I shook off the rust of not studying for a decade. Eventually I got okay about it and then I actually did pretty well. I passed the certification exam and realized that I had made such a big deal about nothing for years when I could have just done the thing.

In 2024, I finally put in an application for an apartment in Seattle, WA, a city I had wanted to live in for more than half a decade. I did it on a whim. I didn’t even think I would actually get the apartment! But over the course of five days and a virtual tour and the lease signing process, suddenly I needed to pick up my life and move 1000 miles away. I have spent the last three months getting used to a new city, feeling the excitement of a new adventure, and reveling in finally being here. I have also been grappling with the fact that I could have made this move any time in the last five years had I not been waiting for the perfect moment.

In 2024, I finally started writing again. And I mean really writing, not scratching out 300 words and then not doing it again for a whole year. Thousands of words on a short story and a novel I had the first idea of at least three years ago. I go to a writing group regularly now. I think about my stories all the time again. I am starting to feel the spark I felt half a lifetime ago when they came easily and I was constantly creating.

I am trying not to mourn all the time I lost thinking I needed to make something perfect from thin air, thinking of how much more I could have done if I had just started a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago.

No amount of prep work makes climbing a mountain easier.

I won’t get those years back to write more, so I am going to throw myself into it this year with that much more determination. I won’t try and compare myself to the versions of me that could have been if I had started earlier.

And I won’t wait around anymore. There’s nothing to lose by starting and everything to lose by waiting.