All the versions I was before

And claiming my path as a writer.

What am I doing here?

This question rings through my head over and over again. Not here on Substack, which is what I thought the question was for the past few months. But what am I doing here on planet earth?

I love being a mother. It is an identity and piece of my story I longed to claim since I was little. The wound of not feeling loved by my mother set me on the path of wanting to love someone else fully and help guide them in this world.

And, it is not everything I long to be. The existential dread lies in the denial of what I long to be.

I long to be a writer.

The irony is palpable as I sit to you writing because a writer is a person who writes. But it is hard for me to admit I want to write.

I have moved from career to career, from path to path. Each one holding a very real piece of my heart. I wanted to be a lawyer after I saw my neighbor go through hell in the family court system. I wanted to be a teacher because I wanted to help kids feel safe at school. I wanted to be a therapist because I wanted to help people heal and find clarity.

Some careers I chose because I like what they were centered around. I loved yoga, so I thought I would love being a yoga teacher. I loved helping people, so I thought I would make a good life coach.

All these paths I have walked were never in error. It was always the aligned choice at that moment in my life…until it wasn’t.

When I left graduate school in August, I thought I would go back eventually. I was about to start my hours as a therapist and it was too much to balance with work and a small human. My mental health was also in shambles.

I thought I would go back when my son was older. Now, I am not sure.

I have had to sit with why I have chosen each path I have chosen in my life. Each choice was for other people. Each choice was from the place of wanting to heal what I couldn’t control. Sometimes it was my traumatic childhood, sometimes it was my mother’s inability to heal and take responsibility for her mental health struggles.

I was driven by a need to heal wounds I had no business healing through other people. I was young and I didn’t know, but I think the drive behind my choices is why those careers didn’t pan out. Because if the choice to follow a path came from a wound, of being able to serve and heal others in hopes to heal myself or my mother, that magic ran out quickly when my life did not change as I pursued them.

Leaving school was the aligned choice and it was hard. It felt like my last aligned path. When I chose to go back to school for therapy, I finally felt I landed on a path I would not be straying from. I thought it was it for me.

I am not so sure why I need to have an it or an end point. I watched my whole family growing up have stable and consistent careers or be stay at home mothers. I thought one was supposed to find something and stick with it. I have never been able to stay with anything, no matter how badly I want to stay with it.

My heart keeps pulling me elsewhere.

To here, to writing.

MAYBE. Who am I to say? Every time I think I have landed on something in life, it changes. But maybe this can be different. All those other paths, I had big asks. Provide me a career, pay my bills, and give me purpose.

I do not ask much of my writing. I do not except to be paid yet. I do not need a career, searching for one has failed me. I do not ask for writing to give me purpose, but it does.

If motherhood holds one half of what I am here to do, I am cautious yet certain writing holds the other half.

I have been writing since I was a little girl. Sometimes in journals, but mostly in my head. I learned early to turn life into a narration to comfort myself.

Nothing was talked about or explained to me in my childhood, so I made sense of it in my own way. I would create comforting characters to take care of me in my head - like imaginary friends - I would use their voices to mother me. Sometimes I would pretend life was a reality TV show, and narrative everything in my head through that lens. Any time I felt anything, instead of feeling it, I went into story mode.

I have been writing my memoir my entire life. Out of comfort, out of necessity, out of protection, out of fear.

There is a constant stream of narrative going on in my head, it is quite exhausting. I find since having my son almost two years ago, it has intensified because of all those quiet moments, usually in the dark, nursing him to sleep. My brain takes off in those moments and it makes sense of my day, my feelings, a trauma, an argument, a dream through a story.

I have started to wonder how to stop this because it is a gift and a curse. I need to feel my feelings instead of jumping into a story about what I feel. After I let the feelings move through me, then I can tell the story.

I am learning feeling the feelings infuses the narrative with more depth. It becomes more rich and complete when the feelings are included instead of absent.

I want to write, and I want to learn how to tell better stories out of joy and love, not only fear and protection. I want to get better at writing, and I want to infuse more emotion into my words to help my reader feel.

I keep feeling this internal pressure to have a plan. I fear I need to have a plan to publish a book or a clear idea of how I want this space to be…but it isn’t coming.

I have a dear friend, and reader, who often shares with me how much she loves my writing. She is also intuitively gifted and tells me this path is wide open for me if I choose it. I told my husband this and he nonchalantly said, “Emma, I always thought you would end up writing books.”

Sometimes people see us before we can see ourselves. Sometimes we do not want to feel what is true for us because we’ve been burned. Sometimes we want a great big plan to feel in control.

There is no control. There is no knowing how it will all turn out.

There is trust and doing the next right thing. Taking that next small step over and over again. This eventually forms a life, maybe a career, maybe a passion project.

I do not know what it will form for me but I do trust myself to lead me on this journey. I am tired of trying to control it and thinking I know what is best for my life or what I am doing here on this planet.

Writing brings me closer to myself, writing brings my closer to Spirit. Writing calms me. Writing fills me. Writing heals me.

I am going to keep choosing it over and over again. Just as I show up for motherhood and keep choosing my son, over and over again.

One foot in front of the other, one day at a time, trusting each step and seeing what will come. Because I am not sure we ever know the answer to what we are doing here even as we are doing it.

Thank you for reading and if you are new, welcome! I invite you to read this to learn more about this space and how to contribute. Here, we explore mothering, healing, breaking cycles, and learning what it means to be ourselves in motherhood.

A massive thank you to everyone who submitted their words for the first installments of the Motherhood Musings series! I have been reading through your words and I am excited to weave them together, I am taking my time but these posts will be coming soon, stay tune!

Recent writings you might have missed…

• Have the strength to look - what I wish someone would have said to me before I became a mother.

• Reclaiming my feminine essence - International Women's Day - Daisy Chain Flower Crown.

• Unspoken Words: Volume 9 & Volume 10 - sharing mothers experiences of what is hard for them in this season of motherhood.