I’m a Regular Now
On becoming at home in a life you once imagined.
I’m a regular now.
Not just at our neighborhood coffee shop or the garden center down the road, but in a life I’d once imagined for myself.
The restaurants that might have once lived on my “someday” vision board are now the places where friends text, Patio tonight? I spend slower evenings wandering our garden to see what decided to bloom overnight. I bake without needing a reason to, and catch myself daydreaming about what my writing rituals might look like when I finally sit down to write the book that’s been in the back of my mind for years.
Our cat, Misty, stretches into patches of afternoon sun on the red brick porch while the cicadas begin their annual hum in the trees above.
At some point, this place stopped feeling new to us and became home.
A year ago, none of this existed. Or at least, not in my everyday life.
It would be easy to look back and tell this story as though everything changed in the blink of an eye. A clean before and after.
But that isn’t really true.
If you’ve been following along with Creative Code, you know I’ve spent the last year experimenting with a different way of living. Planning a creative vision in seasons. Choosing a few guiding words instead of a list of goals. Building toward a feeling instead of a metric.
This is what the other side looks like.
Almost exactly one year ago today, Shane and I packed the last of everything we owned into a moving truck and set off for our next adventure.
One of the final things to go was a tomato plant, the last keepsake from the little cottage garden we’d built behind our place in Old Greenbelt. Somehow, it felt right that it should make the six-hour drive south with us.
We were leaving behind eight years. Eight years of routines, familiar co-op grocery stores, favorite walking paths, deep belly-laugh friendships, and the versions of ourselves we’d become there.
Not everyone gets the chance to start over. But we did.
I was fortunate enough to have a remote job, and we were both ready for something different. One afternoon, we looked at each other and asked a question that felt equally reckless and freeing.
Why not?
That small question became the beginning of everything.
Looking back, I don’t think I understood how much I needed that reset.
Nothing was wrong, exactly.
On paper, life looked good. I was building a career I loved. I had wonderful people around me. There were plenty of reasons to be grateful.
And I was.
But somewhere along the way, I’d stopped feeling like the author of my own days.
Creativity became something I squeezed into the margins. I kept waiting for life to slow down enough that I’d finally write more, host friends, make art, learn pottery, become the version of myself I imagined.
It never did.
Around the same time, I started feeling homesick for a place I hadn’t lived in for years.
For the South.
I missed hearing crickets after dark. Missed the humid green blur of summer. I missed the feeling that nature wasn’t somewhere I had to go, but something I lived inside.
It was one of the first clues that the life I wanted next wasn’t waiting where I already was.
So we left.
And then the hard part began.
Here’s what the vision board never shows you.
Starting over is uncomfortable.
Not in a cinematic, country-road-sunset kind of way. In a slow, ordinary, day-after-day kind of way.
For months, I was a stranger in a new place. It was my own choice, to be fair, but that didn’t make it easier.
I didn’t have friends to text and invite over. I had a house full of boxes, a job on a screen, and suddenly, a whole lot of extra quiet I didn’t quite know what to do with.
There’s a loneliness that lives inside any real reinvention, a stretch where you’ve left the old life behind, but the new one hasn’t fully arrived yet.
As much as it hurts, you have to be willing to stand in that space for a while.
Today, my calendar isn't really any less full.
I still have back-to-back meetings. Deadlines. Laundry to fold, groceries to buy, weeds to pull.
But the rhythm of my life feels completely different.
Now I open the back door before I open my laptop. I try to notice what’s blooming before I notice what’s new in my inbox. I chitchat with the barista before I sit a while and write. I write because I’m curious about something, not because I need to produce more.
From the outside, those changes probably sound small.
To me, they’ve changed everything.
Because I realized creativity was never another thing to fit into my life.
It was the way I wanted to live it.
The image on the vision board is the easy part.
How you get there is made of countless small choices no one sees.
You don’t wake up one morning transformed into someone new. You become someone new slowly, by choosing, again and again, to build the life anyway.
To say yes to coffee with someone you barely know.
To invite people over before the house feels ready.
To water the garden a little longer in the mornings.
To write the first paragraph.
To keep showing up for a life you want, long before it fully feels like yours, and especially through the seasons when it doesn’t feel like much of anything at all.
And then, on some completely ordinary Tuesday, you notice you’ve become a regular.
Not just somewhere.
But here, in a life you once imagined.
As summer settles in, I hope you find a few quiet moments to look inward, too.
What’s working?
What’s asking to change?
What feels heavy?
What’s making you feel alive?
You don’t have to turn everything upside down. Sometimes the next chapter begins with a single question.
Why not?
And sometimes, a year later, you look around and realize you’ve been living inside the answer all along.
Beautiful. I think that's the word I'm searching for. I am so glad I stopped by to read your post.