On what comes before a beginning. 🖋️
Before my story picked up again — before this chapter you’re reading now — there was a long stretch of behind-the-scenes work. Late nights with the glow of the screen, rearranging words, swapping colors, rewriting sentences I’d already rewritten.
It looked like I was rebuilding a blog. And I was. But really, I was rebuilding myself, line by line and piece by piece, trying to prove I could still build something beautiful out of the mess.
For a while, I kept telling myself it wasn’t ready. That I wasn’t ready. I wanted everything polished enough to say, See? I’m fine, even when I wasn’t. I didn’t realize the real work wasn’t on the page at all. It was happening in the quiet moments I chose to keep going.
Pride used to look big: milestones, achievements, things you could point to. But in this season, pride was smaller and quieter. Paying bills on time. Going for a run when I didn’t want to. Showing up for my kids. Writing even when I wasn’t sure the words mattered.
Little by little, I started showing up again. Not just pressing “publish” on posts, but on moments: dinners with friends, quiet walks, small laughter, the everyday signs that life was taking shape again. And the more I lived, the more the words came back too, like small pieces returning to a page I hadn't known how to fill.
That was my prologue. The invisible work no one claps for. The part where I learned to keep living, even when no one saw the effort it took just to turn to the first page.
Because the prologue is never the whole story. It’s the gathering of pieces, the testing of strength, the quiet beginning that sets everything else in motion. And maybe that’s what this truly was: the moment I stopped waiting to be ready and started writing my way toward the first chapter of a life I was ready to step into, letting the blank pages open into a beginning that finally felt possible.
This post is part of my New Chapters series — reflections on rebuilding, resilience, and writing new parts of my story.
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