I spent the last two months convinced I was lost.
Not the dramatic kind. Not wandering through the desert, questioning everything. More like standing in a grocery store without a list. Picking things up. Putting them back. Walking down aisles I didn’t plan on walking down. Leaving with a bag full of stuff that didn’t seem to go together.
That’s what the last 60 days looked like from the inside. Learning a new tool. Then another. Chasing a certification. Then pivoting to a completely different one. Reading documentation for platforms I wasn’t sure I’d ever use. Making calls I wasn’t sure would lead anywhere. The plan we mapped out? It didn’t survive contact with reality. Not even close.
And the whole time, a quiet voice in the back of my head kept saying: you’re just chasing shiny objects again.
I believed it, too. Some days.
But here’s the thing about shiny objects. Sometimes they’re shiny because they’re actually worth picking up. You just can’t see the connection yet.
This week, something clicked. I made a call. The right one, to the right person, at the right time. Not because I planned it that way. Because the last two months of wandering had put me in exactly the right position to make it. The skills I picked up in those random aisles? They were the reason I had something to offer. The detours weren’t detours. They were training I didn’t know I was doing.
I’m not going to pretend I saw this coming. I didn’t. The path that got me here looks nothing like the one I drew on the whiteboard. It’s messier. Less linear. Full of turns I would have edited out if I were writing it as fiction.
But I’m not writing fiction. I’m living it forward and understanding it backward, same as everyone else.
I don’t want to oversell the moment. It’s early. The opportunity is real but it’s not a guarantee. What I will say is this: for the first time in a while, the current feels like it’s moving with me instead of against me. That’s not nothing. That’s a tide change.
And tide changes don’t announce themselves. There’s no horn. No email notification. You just realize one day that the water is higher than it was. That the thing you’ve been building is floating now instead of sitting in the mud.
I spent 60 days thinking I was scattered. Turns out I was assembling. The pieces just didn’t look like pieces until they fit.
If you’re in a season where your plan has gone sideways, where nothing looks like the roadmap, I’ll offer the same thing I keep learning the hard way: the map was never the point. The walking was.
The tide is changing. I can feel it.
The Journey 