It’s 2025, I’m alone in Mexico, and I can’t believe I’m writing on TheLITMOLife.com. I mean, don’t get me wrong – this is the most excited I’ve been to sit down at my computer in a LONG while and I’m thrilled. To be frank, the blog isn’t even rebuilt yet. After a website hack and a SNAFU with my host company, it had to be rebuilt from scratch and doesn’t contain the history of blog posts I had, which is really sad. But I can’t worry about that now. And I’m NOT worried about the blog being perfect yet because I wanted to sit down and get metaphorical pen to paper (fingers to keys) and jump into the next chapter of my life. Whatever that is.
And I regret ever stopping writing.
As you’ll see from the EXTREMELY pretentious title of this blog post, I’ve recently come to realize that we are nothing without art. And specifically I am nothing without creative expression. I’ve been living a very, very happy life since I last saw you 8 years ago. It’s been full of husband, animals, family, friends, love, adventure. And yet it lacked one, big glaring thing: personal expression. I found it other ways once I abandoned writing – through first my yoga, then handbalancing and contortion. I was, it must be said, always doing SOMETHING to express myself in SOME way but I wasn’t doing my first and only true artistic love: writing.
I started reading The Artist’s Way several weeks ago after I watched TikTok after Tiktok recommending the book and it made me remember how much I love words. How much I love the connection of words to the soul for expression. How I’d spent the past 8 years finding ways to express myself through physical art forms and human connections, but without letting the words flow out of my fingertips, I was feeling incomplete.
I tried (and hated) to align myself to the artistic mediums of the day through social media and no matter how much I pushed and pushed and pushed, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t find love in video editing or scrolling or filming. Writing, however badly, however quickly, however inconsistently, has always been the way that I make myself heard.
I know this is all so lofty and pukey. Unfortunately, it’s also how I really feel.
And the deeper truth is that I’m in pain. And there is never a better or more apt season of life to discover or re-discover art than when you feel the feelings inside of you cannot remain inside because they’re too big, or too happy, or in some cases, too deep and dark and painful to stay trapped in the body. And that’s where I am now. The past 8 years have been largely happy ones, yes, but the past two years, since my beloved soulmate, love of my life, and true best friend, my dog Holly, left this planet have been the hardest two years I’ve ever lived. The loss of Holly stacked on top of a great many disappointments of friends, work, lifestyle, and now of course, one of the greatest disappointments of the country of my birth becoming a place I don’t recognize.
I needed an out. And instead of creating a new one, I found my way back to the baby I birthed and have loved from the start: this blog.
I don’t know what I’m going to do with this blog yet but I also don’t care because all I need is a creative outlet again. And so much of my life has shifted, changed, and evolved, as any well-lived life should, and I have so many feelings about all of it. The feelings haven’t had a place to go. And now I hope they have a home again.
This is as much to myself as to any serendipitous reader: welcome back to The LITMO Life.