Happy Second Birthday Becoming Inevitable
As of yesterday, this blog is officially two years old. And like most birthday celebrations in my family, it was quietly acknowledged while pushing the celebration off to another time. That was pretty much the norm in my family growing up and feels very familiar with military life. It's not necessarily the date that matters, but the fact that we do celebrate. That being said, the celebration didn’t exactly feel warranted when I took the last month off of writing. Perhaps we are heading into the terrible twos, and like any parent with a child transitioning from baby to toddler, we are probably already there. In this case, though, the terrible twos are coming from me, not my blog.
For my first year of writing, I was incredibly consistent. There were only a few days that I didn’t post anything. Year two was a totally different story, though. From April of 2024 to April of 2025, I’ve taken at least four months off without necessarily intending to.
Writing was and still is harder. The energetic passion that existed when I started this has faded, which is something that happens with every dream. At some point, the only thing in front of us is the work, and we don’t always make the right choice in those moments. This dream was also overshadowed by a new dream that I found with estate planning.
Loving our work and having new dreams is great. We must take full advantage of those moments when energy is high, and our passion carries us through easily. But every dream has a crash, and we must be prepared to face it. I knew I was playing the long game with these goals when I started this blog. Some people blow up overnight, but almost every overnight success has years of hard work under their belt before you start seeing their name everywhere. I had no expectation of being the exception to that rule.
I didn’t have expectations for what year two would look like, which may be part of the problem. If I had specific targets for these years then I could better measure what success and my work (or lack thereof) was accumulating to. Chasing a dream is a delicate balance of too much pressure and not enough. Having no targets made it easier to take months off of the blog because all I really had to deal with was my guilt. I didn’t have a visual of what that time was actually affecting. Conversely, putting strict targets and rules on ourselves is more likely to lead to burnout than anything else. Our quick successes will be dashed when we no longer have the energy to continue.
Unfortunately, the right answer is different for everyone. We have to figure that balance out for ourselves. And that balance is going to change as life does. Being military spouses means that our lives are constantly in flux between TDYs, deployments, and PCSs. All that is on top of the usual juggling of young children, school schedules, family responsibilities, and everything else. The plan that works in August may not work in November, so we must be prepared for that. But beyond that, we must be prepared to fail when caught off guard.
No plan survives contact with the enemy. We will never be able to prepare for all the possibilities along our path. Even if our plan factors in school schedules and holiday seasons, we will still be caught off guard when the flu takes the whole house out for two weeks. Our dreams don’t need perfection; they need us to keep trying. And we have to be okay with the fact that perfection will always elude us.
I may not be the perfect person for this dream. Someone better than me would have achieved way more. They wouldn’t have let life and fear get in the way nearly as much as I have. But that’s not how dreams work. More often than not we are dealt cards that force us to become better people to truly achieve that dream. Two years in and a lifetime to go chasing this dream. It only gets better from here. Happy belated birthday, Becoming Inevitable!