Hello, it's been a while

Yesterday I was sitting in forty minutes of traffic that should have taken twenty when I realised I hadn’t written here since October 2024.

The audiobook The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo was playing in the background, but I wasn’t listening anymore. It had been losing me for a couple of days. It had become noise filling the car while my mind drifted somewhere else entirely, to my Substack account that I had not opened since October 2024.

It’s now the end of June 2026.

Nothing about the last eighteen months feels like a single, clear story. Days that look similar on the surface but quietly accumulate into something different underneath.

When I applied for my current role, I wanted to see if I could write a résumé strong enough to get an interview.

When I was invited to interview, I told myself it would be useful experience. I wanted to understand what that level of conversation felt like.

When the job was offered to me, I accepted it as an opportunity to learn something new, and something that would help my family financially.

I had no experience in the field I stepped into. After more than twenty years on the same hospital campus, I didn’t even know where the executive building was. And suddenly I was sitting in it, in rooms where decisions were being made that I had never been part of before.

I walked in with a racing heart and a shaking voice, but I walked into them prepared. And over time, that preparation became its own kind of stability.

At home, life was shifting in quieter ways. Scott and I began to change how we thought about money. We started thinking seriously about our future and investing in it one step at a time, learning as we went, adjusting as we learned, and being guided toward decisions that would create more options later rather than more comfort right now.

We renovated our kitchen and bathroom during this time as well.

Most mornings begin at 4.45am. Monday to Friday evenings end in traffic. The hours between home and work are long enough that I’ve stopped trying to resist them and understand the drive is a choice so that I can do the work I do. I listen to audiobooks to fill the kilometres and time that don’t align, because it makes the soul-destroying commute feel less heavy. Right now, it’s The Familiar, and I am looking forward to finishing it (not because I want to know the ending, but because I always finish a book once I’ve started it). Before that it was The Four Winds, Weyward, Go as a River.

At night I write in my journal, because I need somewhere to unload the day before I sleep and then wake between 1-3am.

This hasn’t been a season of creativity in the way I once practiced creativity. There hasn’t been much space for photography or writing or long reflection. It has been a season of choices. Of getting up early. Of going to work during the day after more than twenty years of shift work. Of learning things I didn’t know. Of asking questions and listening to understand and learn. Of showing up again the next day. Of carrying things that don’t need to be explained publicly.

And somewhere in all of that, I’ve started to understand something differently.

We tend to notice the milestones. The promotion. The renovation. The investment. The visible markers of progress that can be named and shared and explained easily.

But that isn’t where most of life happens. Most of it happens in the private choices.

The decision to keep going when you’re tired, heartbroken, uncomfortable, unsure. The decision to prepare to build your on confidence. The decision to save instead of spend. The decision to ask rather than assume. The decision to hold space and have the conversation anyway.

None of those choices feel particularly significant on their own. They don’t feel like identity-shaping moments while you are in them.

But over time, they are.

They shape the kind of worker you become. The kind of partner you are. The kind of mother you are. The kind of future you’re quietly building without always realising it.

Looking back, I feel proud because I kept choosing the next step and becoming a woman I can trust.