Long term, I don't know what the heck I'm doing. I'm trying my best every day, anyway.

I’ve been writing on Substack for 15 months, and you would think that by now, I would have my shït together. When you get here, you’re supposed to build a brand, write inside of a niche. I started with one name and a different focus, and now I have another name and focus, which was supposed to be a clean reboot. But as time goes by, I’ve realized that I still haven’t really done what I originally planned to do: figure out exactly what the hëll I’m doing here, in life or in my writing. Even if from the outside, I’ve done a good job of making it look like I know what I’m doing.

Yesterday I met a stranger and we started chatting, and I mentioned that I’m a writer. She asked me what I write about and as I fished around for a concise way to explain it, I realized that I’ve really never quite managed to figure out my elevator pitch. I mentioned the farm; she asked if I write about farming. And my answer was, yes, kind of, but not totally. I explained the whole “be a good egg” thing, which she thought was cool, and then I promptly realized that if she actually scrolled through my notes and posts as she was planning to do after our conversation, she would get a “farm-lite” experience — mostly philosophical essays, poems and personal laments tinged with flavors of farm life and a bunch of photos of chickens, and would probably end up wondering what kind of nebulous zone she stumbled into, when from the outset, talking about farming seems like it should be a very straightforward framework for a blog.

The basic truth to myself that I’ve been trying to outrun for almost a lifetime is that I’ve never quite been able to pin myself down. Most of my so-called dreams have been resolutions to immediate problems; most of my writing has been unfocused and overly reliant on that famously unreliable muse. One of my top qualities is my resilience: any time something doesn’t work out the way I thought it would, I just pick myself up and keep moving on. It’s a helpful quality to have until you’ve spent so long doing that that you’ve forgotten how to actually pick your head up and assess situations before moving on, or how to take the time to figure out what it is you really want instead of just jumping into the short-term problem-solving mode that inevitably starts constructing your longer-term reality.

The reality around me has been built by short-term solutions that I’ve tried to assimilate into long-term goals that made sense on paper. That includes the farm — which started with land that my husband and I bought because my horse was being systematically starved and neglected at nearly every boarding facility she had been at. It wasn’t a choice made because I had a lifelong dream to become a farmer, but because I had a problem that desperately needed solving. Everything else unfolded after I lost my job and needed somewhere to ground myself.

I’m sure many of you can sense the chafing I’ve felt in my spirit lately — I’ve been disquieted, wrestling with questions about nearly everything from where I live, to motherhood, to my future path. I’ve been trying to quell the disquiet with a neatly framed mission — which, by the way, still exists — but it’s still there lurking under the smiling photos, inspired prose and crisply designed Egghead tees.

At the foundation of the disquiet is the sense that I’m living as I always have — helping others, solving problems — but I’m not living for any vision of a future that I can fully picture and that I feel embodies the things I’ve been searching for on a soul-level. The financial reality of what I’m doing currently means that I’m dependent on my husband, which terrifies me for reasons known to every woman; twisted into that are the challenges with raising my kids and figuring out how to best help and educate my special-needs son. I am caught in a maelstrom: somewhere between solving for my son’s issues and having my career absolutely shipwrecked by AI and a shïtty job market, my short-term solution to a sense of purpose — the farm — rose like the shards of the ship’s mast into the fog. I’ve been clinging to it in desperation, the last piece of solid wreckage between me and the roiling seas, without a sense of who I am or what I might be doing if I could actually see the sun through the mist.

The worst part of it all is knowing I’ve built an identity and a following around the work that until now, has probably seemed so sure to people. How do you admit to people that for the past however long, you’ve never actually had the time and space to sit down and figure out if what you’re doing is something you really want long-term, and not just something you slid into as the closest escape hatch? Well, I guess I’m doing it now.

I realize that by writing this I could be blowing up every single thing that I’ve worked toward and built for the past several months. But I can’t keep wrestling with these feelings and pretending that everything is fine and that I have a clear sense of where I’m headed. Golden Thread Farm is still here. Be a good egg is still here. I’m still giving eggs to the food bank and I plan to keep doing that. I just don’t know if this is it for me — because if it was, I don’t think this disquiet would still be here; this gnawing sensation that something is not quite right, that there’s something missing that’s still calling to me from somewhere like a siren song on the wind. There’s still a dull ache that goes without being soothed, even after the kids and animals have all been fed and cared for, the neighbors have received their cartons of eggs and the most recent note has gotten its 50 hearts.

I thought I was past this point and that I had everything all figured out. I’ve been terrified of admitting to myself, much less anyone else, that I don’t have it all figured out — in fact, I have absolutely no fücking clue what I’m doing in the broader scope of things. But I’m still here, and I’m going to keep working on it. Golden Thread Farm as a whole isn’t going away, and I’m not going away, and I’m just going to keep doing the best I can every day, even if it’s messy and isn’t neatly packaged with an easily discernable conclusion or end goal. Ultimately, every day is all we really have, anyway.