When Life Happens

"So what was the worst first date you ever had?" asked my friend Aaron.

My husband and I were having dinner with him and his fiancee Agapi the weekend before they left for their wedding in New York. As we exchanged experiences about blind dates and bad pick up lines, we spent the better part of an hour laughing.

"Man, I used to write down some of these stories," I said, as we all caught our breath. "I had a blog in college where I wrote a lot of them down and a bunch of other stuff, too."

"What happened to it?" asked Agapi.

"Um, Life happened," I shrugged. They laughed.

Yet, after dinner, I went away with my own answer accusing me: "Life happened." What did that even mean? That I'm a lazy writer? Was "Life" my excuse for not doing something I actually loved?

When my husband and I started dating (six years ago now), I was in the thick of a full-time job and part-time Master's program. My family also lived in town, so I was very involved in their lives and them in mine. Add a dating relationship in there, and as wonderful as each of these things were, my emotions, and time, were maxed out, leaving very little energy for the writing and creative outlets I loved.

No doubt it would have done me good to carve out more time for them, but at the ripe old age of 24 I was still learning a lot about who I really was as a person. Besides that,  my job paid my bills, my Masters program needed to be completed in order for me to teach, my family needed me, and I was in love with an amazing guy.

And there are only 24 hours in a day.

So the blog, the creative writing, quietly went away.

 I often felt conflicted about this, wondering if I was doing something wrong by not allowing more time for those things.


Have you ever felt this? Where something you loved to do somehow got obscured by the thing called Life--maybe a new job, a new relationship, perhaps family circumstances--something that demanded time and energy that you had formerly put into that other thing?

In some cases it can be a really good thing. For instance, it's probably a good thing that my work, family, and a husband  needed me enough so that I no longer spent my Saturdays sleeping until noon, watching romantic comedies all day, and sobbing over not having a date for the weekend.

But sometimes that "thing" we brushed off--well, perhaps it meant more to us than we realized. Maybe, we need to take a little time to rediscover what it was that created that certain spark in our lives.


And that's really the reason I started blogging again. It wasn't until really last year, after nearly five years of insanity--a graduation, a job switch, and a wedding--that I was able to start recovering some of my creative outlets. Now I'm in a slower time, where the creative times come easier, and I'm doing all I can to use it, because I realize how much it means to me.


I have friends who preach the Gospel of Undeterred Artistic Consistency, where the artist always, always, ALWAYS creates, no matter the circumstances. I wish I could be like that, but frankly I cannot. 

What did I find I could do was to slowly find times where I could read, write, process, and think, even if it was only 15 minutes in the morning, or  maybe an hour on the weekend. I found the time eventually, and when more time opened up, I was ready. And here I am blogging.

If you're in a period of creative dryness now, it may be a time to just rest, or even like a I did, put down your roots to see where  there is water. Maybe a little bit over here for 10 minutes, maybe a little inspiration over here for an hour.

Life happens, to be sure. But that doesn't have to be the final answer.