Right now I’m on an airplane and flying to London for work, so this seems like a good time to tell you- I went back to a full time job.

This was brewing in 2018, and I referenced it in my reflection on the freelance life in this blog post, talking about what I wish I had known beforehand. I mentioned that my old office had talked to me about going back, and, while it took some time to get the right role set up, I went back full time at the beginning of April. My new job is fantastic, I have a great team that I manage, and there is some fun travel involved (hi London!). It’s a big adjustment, and I am still trying to figure out when I can fit in writing time, and how to suddenly meet the demands of being in an office 5 days a week again. But this is the sort of problem that I am grateful to have. Also grateful to have benefits!

I initially resigned from Stitchcraft Marketing last summer (side note: Stitchcraft is great, me leaving had nothing to do with the job), for what I thought was going to be a dream job – writing a weekly column for a national newspaper. it was supposed to be a really big deal…. but then it never  happened.  I’m not going to go into details, but it fell through before it even began, and I was gutted beyond belief. I actually missed a friend’s barbecue because I started to cry over it one morning and then found I couldn’t stop. there’s nothing that could happen that would make me want to quit writing, but there are some things that make you rethink the schedule of your life plan. That, coupled with the fact that we live in a two bedroom townhouse and James sleeps in a nook outside of Lila’s bedroom means that we really need to get a bigger home in the next couple of years. We have talked about bunk beds, but Lila is 7 so we probably only have 2 years at the most that they could share a room without it getting a bit strange.

There are a lot of things I miss about freelance, specifically the flexibility of my schedule and the time I had for writing. But I also have flexibility in my new workdays, and it’s really about me finding the new rhythm, and getting more diligent about how I use my time, specifically on evenings and weekends. It’s not easy, but I’m getting there.

I also get to ride my new Vespa to and from the office, which alternates between being amazing and being terrifying. And we have started looking at houses which is sort of fun (the prices make it less fun, gulp!). It feels like so much of life is like that lately- both sides of the coin, the good, the not-quite.

Sometimes a step back isn’t a step back at all. Sometimes it’s a step forward on a path that takes you somewhere even better.