What I Still Want to Create
When I was young, I wanted to write. It was a dream.
I wrote fiction, lots of it. Writing was a place I could disappear into, somewhere beyond whatever was happening in my actual life. I needed the distraction to survive, but my dream somewhere along the way got lost, and eventually I wrote no more.
My professional life did not begin with the luxury of asking what I wanted. I started working to survive at fifteen and a half, first in an escrow office and then for a company that cleared shipments through the ports. There were other office jobs, and for a short period I waited tables because the tips could be good, especially working happy hour through closing when most of the customers were men stopping in after work or after a ball game.
I helped financially support our household, and around the time I turned eighteen, there was a period when I found myself helping care for my siblings. At nineteen, I became a mother. Responsibility arrived early, some through my own choices, others because what else was there to do.
I went back into the business world and kept going. Over time, I learned how to develop products, grow companies, lead people and make decisions. I became good at work I never could have imagined for myself when I was the girl who wanted to write.
Writing receded.
So did much of my creativity, although I didn't fully realize that while it was happening. There wasn't a day when I decided I wasn't creative anymore. Life became incredibly busy and overwhelming and, at times, very heavy. Eventually even journaling, something I had once done regularly, had mostly stopped.
I recognized what had been missing only after I found myself writing again.
Last November, I lost my dog Reese.
She had been with me for fifteen years. I lost her in the early hours of November 2, and the next day I started writing.
I called it Reese's Life Rules.
From November 3 until December 5, I wrote about her. I wrote about our life together, the things she had taught me and the memories I did not want to lose.
The words poured onto the page through those memories.
Writing gave me somewhere to put some of my grief, but more than that, it kept me inside the life we had shared. Every day, I could return to her. I could remember something she had done, something she had taught me, one of the ways she had loved us. I could stay with those memories long enough to find words for them.
“I wanted to continue writing.”
Then I finished the book.
I expected finishing to feel like an accomplishment. Instead, I felt as though I had lost her again.
The writing had ended, and with it went this place I had been going every day to still be with her.
I knew I wanted to publish Reese's Life Rules one day. I still do. It is one of the things I very much want to accomplish. I also realized something else. I wanted to continue writing.
The Steward Edit began from there, although not in some perfectly planned way. There was no moment when I sat down and decided I should start a publication. I simply knew I wanted somewhere for the writing to go and to do something just for me. Much of my life has been doing for others.
Eventually I began thinking about all the things I care about and find myself thinking about. There are so many components to life: work, home, family, faith, food, beauty, aging, relationships, animals and ambition. I wanted to write about all things life and see what I could create from it.
The one thing I did not expect was how vulnerable it would make me feel to put something I wrote out into the world.
I have spent decades in my career. Experience does not mean I always get things right, but my work I understand.
With The Steward Edit, I am a beginner again. There is excitement in that. There are new skills to learn and an entirely different business to understand.
Wanting to write isn't the same thing as doing it well. Loving an idea does not mean there is someone else who will. Wanting something for me, The Steward Edit, doesn't mean it will become what I hope it can.
I haven't had the moment when I've thought, I know I can do this. I am just doing it and figuring it out as I go along.
Being inexperienced and beginning again at 56 is different.
By this point in our lives, we know where we are strong. We know what people will call us for and what problems we can solve. We are comfortable with the competence we have developed over a lifetime.
Beginning again disrupts that.
Suddenly there are things you don't know or that you are not good at yet. You ask for advice, do the work, learn as you go, and still there are no guarantees about where it is leading.
What I do know is that I'm enjoying it.
Not every minute of it. Some moments are frustrating, and some make me question myself. Sharing pieces of my own life makes me feel vulnerable in a way that my career does not.
I hope I never lose ambition or dreams. I think they're wonderful.
What do I want to create?
My ambition now is different from what it was when I was younger. When I was young, ambition was created by necessity. I needed to work. I had others to take care of, and I had a son.
Now I have the privilege of asking a different question.
What do I want to create?
This is what I'm becoming more interested in.
I have spent most of my career helping develop products, grow companies and create value for other people. I am proud of that work, but I also want to create something for me.
That does not require abandoning the life I already have. I love what I do. I just want something more, something that lives in my dreams. This lets me be creative, and it's a stress outlet at the end of the day. It takes time, but it gives me energy back. It isn't draining.
The Steward Edit may never commercialize into anything. I know that.
I still want people to read it. I hope the work connects with them. I want to discover whether something I created for myself can also become a real business. That isn't entirely how I measure whether it was worth doing.
If someone reads something here and leaves with an idea, or something I write resonates with someone, that matters to me.
There is another reason I had not thought of when I started. I'm creating a body of work over time.
In the future, my children and grandchildren will be able to read these pieces and know things about me they might otherwise never know. They may discover what I thought, what I struggled with, what made me laugh, what I found beautiful, what I hoped for and what I was still dreaming about.
Maybe Reese's Life Rules will comfort them in some way. We all loved her. We all lost her.
I feel grateful that creativity and dreams have reentered my life and lifted some of the heaviness I have carried for a long time. Of course I've done a lot of work along the way. I love putting my energy into something I enjoy.
The girl who disappeared into the fiction she wrote would not believe the life I have today.
That girl would be so happy that I'm writing again.
Now, instead of disappearing into another life, I'm finally writing from my own.
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