Why I Write This Thing (And How a Good Day Can Still Hurt Like Hell)

 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why I even write this blog. Not in a dramatic “I’m going dark” way — just in the normal Gen X way where your brain suddenly decides to get reflective between errands.

Most of what I post here is light. Funny. Nostalgic. Stuff you can read while eating a sandwich. But life isn’t just made out of the light parts. Sometimes a perfectly good day bumps into an old scar, and suddenly you’re time-traveling emotionally while trying to find a parking space.

Case in point:
Jacob made Eagle Scout.
Huge deal. Pure pride.

Have to write more about it in a separate post.
A milestone you want to wrap in bubble wrap and save forever.

But to get to the ceremony, I had to drive through That Town.

Everybody has a place like this — a town that looks normal on Google Maps but turns into psychological dodgeball the minute you’re actually in it. You pass a restaurant where you once had a “we need to talk” conversation. you see restaurant parking lots that hold the ghosts of tearful goodbyes. You pass the lawyer’s office where a whole chapter of your life got rewritten. You see courthouse signs that make your stomach tighten like it’s auditioning for an Olympic knot-tying team.

And then it gets even more personal.

Here’s the street where you spent a beach-house-sized retainer just to walk away with custody of one out of two kids.
Here’s the guardian ad litem’s office — the one who thought splitting up siblings was somehow a brilliant plan, like she was drafting them for a fantasy football league.
Here’s the parking lot where you sat in your car afterward, wondering how something meant to protect kids could feel like it made everything ten times harder.

With my annoyingly accurate sense of direction, I didn’t even get the mercy of taking a wrong turn. No escape routes. No detours. Just a greatest-hits tour of every emotional landmine I’d hoped I’d never see again.

The whole drive felt like getting kicked in the balls by my own past.
Repeatedly.
With enthusiasm.

But here’s the strange thing — it was still a happy day.

That’s what got me thinking about this blog.

Why write all this down?
Why put any of this out there?
Not because I expect fame or riches — I made forty-nine cents before shutting off monetization.
Not because I think this turns into a book deal.
I write because I like being able to look back and see the truth of my life — the funny, the painful, the good days built on top of bad ground.

Facebook memories give you snapshots.
This blog gives me context.

Growing up Gen X, we weren’t exactly encouraged to talk about feelings. If you so much as hinted at having an emotion in 1994, your friends immediately hit you with the Friendly Insult Olympics. That stuff sticks. Even now, every honest sentence comes with an instinct to duck.

But here’s the thing:
The darker parts don’t ruin the good ones —
they define them.

Jacob’s ceremony, in that hard town, made the bright parts brighter because I had to drive through everything that came before. The past didn’t disappear. It didn’t get rewritten. It didn’t need to.

The day was still good.
Maybe even better.

And maybe that’s what growing up really is — learning to hold both truths at once.
Light and dark.
Good and bad.
Pride seasoned with old bruises.
Laughing while your stomach remembers things you wish it didn’t.

So yeah, I’m going to keep writing the whole story.
Not every detail — just the real stuff.
The funny, the rough, the proud, the ghosts, the wins, and everything in between.

And to the 22 of you who show up every time I hit publish:
thanks for letting me figure all this out in real time.

More coming soon —
the silly, the serious, the sideways grin —
the whole ride.

Hannah polished off two sandwiches and a tube of Pringles and passed out before we even hit Anderson, so the ride home left me alone with my thoughts. And here’s about as close as I get to poetry:

“The sun sat at my back on that four-hour trip, pouring gold into the side-view mirror. I’ve seen that light before on drives that ended in goodbyes, heavy talks, and long quiet rides home. There’s something about a sunset behind you—it always feels like you’re leaving someone, or something, that mattered. Even on a day like today, when the trip is for something good, that old ache rides along. The moment I just passed is already gone, but the memory stays, warm and painful at the same time, reminding me that every mile forward holds a shadow of what I’ve had to leave behind.”