Half a year later

As you can read from those last two posts, I did something at the end of July that took me in a completely different direction than I had anticipated.

Apparently, I had also intended to blog about my experiences teaching middle school on a separate blog (hence the two posts I just found)

But in the words of Sweet Brown- "ain't nobody got time for that."

Too much has happened in the last five months to even begin to write about it all, but let's just summarize with this statement:

I forgot about my word of the year.

I took a full-time teaching job on a whim- the exact opposite of being deliberate. It has proven to be a decision that I regret on an almost daily basis.

I completely forgot about this blog until about 6 weeks ago, and even then I only recalled my word of the year. I did not go back and read anything I had written on this blog until yesterday. And, y'all- I cannot begin to tell you the amount of heartache I could have saved myself if I had, because as I am rereading what I wrote in the first half of 2017, nearly everything that has happened since then is in direct contrast to what I intended.

Let's take away the "has happened" and be honest: these things did not just happen. I put myself in a place where I would let them happen, and in some cases even deliberately pursued them.

A few weeks ago, I realized that deliberate had irrevocably been thrown out the window, and there was no way to undo that.  And if you can't undo something, what can you do but keep moving forward? 

Today, especially, I am looking forward, but to do that I also need to take a long, deliberate look back. I didn't realize how much introspection I had done while writing here, and how therapeutic it is.

As I'm rereading my past year I'm intrigued to find that the end of summer/beginning of school seems to be a falling-off point in blogging for me, based on this post.

Lots to think about.