New Chapters ◦ Chapter Two: The Rebuild ◦ Entry 2
This post is part of my New Chapters series — a collection of personal essays about rebuilding, resilience, and writing what comes next, told in evolving chapters.
Once the logistics of survival stopped consuming every hour — the moves, the paperwork, the job changes — a little quiet opened up in my days. Not peace exactly, but space. Enough space to notice what I’d been missing.
After I let myself begin again in the smallest ways, saying yes to plans, leaving the house, I found myself opening old folders on my laptop without a clear plan. I thought about my old writing. The blog I had curated for half of my life. I started clicking into draft dashboards, scrolling through titles I hadn’t touched in years. I wasn’t trying to rebuild yet. I was just looking.
Eventually, looking turned into a decision. The site itself had been dark for years, unpublished and scattered, and if it was going to exist again, I would have to rebuild it by hand: post by post, page by page, pulling the archive back together from fragments.
When I finally started restoring the posts, I thought it would be a simple project: copy, paste, clean up some formatting. Get things back in order. I didn’t expect it to feel like grief.
That’s what it’s been. Grief, disguised as nostalgia, tucked between old sentences and half-forgotten stories.
Every post is a time capsule. A snapshot of who I used to be, what my life used to look like, and the people who used to be in it. Reading it all now, after everything has ended, makes the contrast impossible to ignore. I’ve reread pages I wrote when I was falling in love. When I was planning a wedding. When I was building a home, starting a family, imagining a future I thought I’d grow old inside of.
That life doesn’t exist anymore.
Some of those people don’t either. Not really, not in my world.
And so I’ve been reading my own words with a lump in my throat. Crying at memories I didn’t expect to hit so hard. Laughing at old versions of myself I forgot existed. Grieving the woman who wrote those posts, and the life she was writing her way into.
I miss her sometimes.
I miss how simple her dreams were. I miss how certain she was. I miss the way she loved, and the way she believed things would last forever.
It’s strange to read the archives of your own life and realize how much of it is no longer true. It’s like visiting a house you used to live in. You still know the layout, but the furniture’s all gone. You still recognize the rooms, but the people who made them feel like home aren’t there anymore.
But here’s what I’m holding on to:
I still have the words.
Even if the life has changed, the words are mine. They mattered then, and they still matter now — not because they predicted the future, but because they captured a moment. A feeling. A version of me that existed, and lived, and loved, and wrote it all down.
And so, I’m rebuilding this blog. Slowly, one post at a time.
And in doing so, I think I’m also rebuilding myself. Quietly, one day at a time.
Next: The Story I Didn't Delete →
Visit the New Chapters landing page to explore each chapter and read the story in order.
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