When It's Not How You Planned, But It's Your Path

I'm sitting in the bedroom where I grew up.

I didn't plan to be here. But when you're living in a townhouse and you have a baby who's started to crawl, fear has a way of making you make the right decision. I know people raise children in townhouses every day. I'm just not one of those people. As a first-time mom — a single mom by choice — my anxiety reached heights I didn't know were possible, and I knew what I needed to do. I called home. I asked to move back.

And it didn't rock me the way you might think it would.

If you've ever made a call that looked like backing down but felt like moving forward, you already know where this is going.

I'd already made decisions that weren't exactly in the handbook. Choosing to have a baby on my own has a way of recalibrating everything. Moving home barely registered. What it did do was make me stop and look at the shape of my life — at all the times the plan fell apart and something better, or at least something more mine, took its place.

The first time I moved back to this room, I had just come home from two years in London.

I was going to be a fashion journalist. That was the plan at 18 — specific, certain, mapped out. Instead of going straight into the workforce, I packed a suitcase and left the country. I didn't know anyone there. Every decision I made, I made on my own. And when it didn't work out the way I imagined, I came home and slept in this same room, in this same bed, and figured out what was next.

What was next was my blog. And then my first job in social media — back when I didn't know a single person who worked in it. Another lone bet on something I couldn't fully explain yet.

I was years behind the friends who hadn't packed a suitcase and left. But I wouldn't trade those years for anything. London shaped me in ways that a traditional path couldn't have. And the blog and the social media career that came after? They only existed because I'd gone sideways first.

There's something people say about being present — about staying in the moment — and I believe in that. But sometimes it's worth stepping back and looking at where you've been. Not to dwell, but to see the pattern.

Every major move I've made, I made without a map. Without a peer group who'd done it first. Without a guarantee. And every single time, the thing that looked like a detour turned out to be exactly where I was supposed to go.

The two years I've been home with Romy are no different.

I've watched her crawl turn into running. I've taken her to dance class. I've driven her around singing songs at the top of our lungs. I've walked into her room to wake her up from a nap and just stood there for a second, because this — this — is what I dreamed about when I was 18. Not the logistics of it, not the shape of the family, not the bedroom I'd be living in. But the moments. They were always going to be part of my path. They just didn't arrive as planned.

None of this was the plan. But it was always my path.

And I want to be clear about something: the path is not destiny. Some of it is a little magical, I won't lie. But you can decide to go left instead of right, up instead of down. You're not being carried somewhere. You're building the path as you walk it.

I'm sitting in my old room — the room where I used to lie awake dreaming of someday — and I can feel another turn coming. I've been freelancing part-time while I'm home with Romy, and I can sense it the same way I sensed London, the same way I sensed social media, the same way I sensed that phone call home. It's time to figure out if I'm going left or right.

I don't know which way yet. But I'm not anxious about it. It's a little exciting. It's a little fun. And I'm ready to explore again.

If you're standing at one of these forks too — not sure which way, just sure it's time — I'd love to know what pulled you off the plan and onto your path. That's what this space is for.