At work, the advice we’re given is to know what your lede or “action title” is before you build your page (i.e., PowerPoint slide). In other words, know the story you’re trying to tell first before filing it with the details.

But here I am, words spilling out in possibly the most unstructured manner before I can even decide what I want to write about.

Today has been the first time in weeks where I have made the conscious effort to just sit with my thoughts and feelings. My weekdays have been so densely packed with work and more work and thinking about work that I have had barely enough time to do anything other than eat and sleep and occasionally doom scroll for what feels like 5 minutes which really turns out – to my utmost despair – to be 30 minutes before bed. Thank God for amazing teammates who make the long hours bearable, fun even, when it feels like we (mainly me) are losing our sanity at 1am in the office, snacking on cheesecakes we’d bought earlier in the day knowing we’d have the whole night ahead of us. The lack of a life on weekdays has resulted in me cramming as much social and physical activity as humanly possible for an introvert into my weekends to maximise the limited time I have, while still being able to squeeze in a nap to counter the mental and physical exhaustion from the week. Writing this out makes me realise how unsustainable this lifestyle is…but I really don’t have any complaints I guess. There are worse things.

But today is different. I’d originally had plans to head out for a drink or two with some girlfriends, but instead I am at home, staring at a screen, writing (Can we really call it that? Feels a bit more like word-vomiting at this point). I’m about halfway through a book called An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green and it’s been fun and intriguing so far. It feels nice to be absorbed in a book again.

But anyway, back to sitting with my feelings. My heart has been heavy – and as much as I hate to admit it, I think I’ve been feeling scared. Scared that time is passing too fast, that no matter how much I convince myself that I’m still in my twenties, that I am not anymore and I am actually very much expected to be a fully functioning adult (Does anyone really know what that means?? If you do, please let me know?), that I am somehow running out of time and that I am so, so behind in achieving what society deems as success when a woman reaches their thirties. I am terrified, because even though I know my worth is measured by so much more than what society thinks, I can’t help but feel like I’m constantly paddling out into current that is pushing against me, over and over and over. How did I get here?

At work they teach us this other thing called framing, where you learn that while the numbers and the data don’t necessarily change, how you tell the story can and does make a huge difference in delivering a story. I guess I should be taking a page out of that book. So much more to learn about myself and the world, so much to be grateful for, so much more to this life than what I can possibly fathom in this moment. I refuse to settle.