Finding Home.

BY MEGHAN REEVE

Meg is a 34 yr old iced coffee drinking California girl living in the PNW. She is a tiny human teacher and a cheerleader for the dreams of not only the tiny humans but every human in her life. She strives to show others who they are by trying to be exactly who she is on the daily.

I can’t write after work.

My brain is dead, my body is tired, and connecting phrases in my brain just seems to be a really hard thing.

For reference: I am a preschool teacher. I work eight hours a day leading a classroom of 12-15 tiny humans, doing a multitude of tasks, and sometimes doing other jobs in my center.

And when I get home, the last thing I want to do is write.

I desperately want to be a writer. That’s all I want to do, really. Placing words on a screen or a piece of paper. Putting pieces of myself out into the atmosphere to allow others to connect, relate, and feel a little less alone makes me feel as if I am doing what I am meant to do.

I want to write every day, but my brain and my body after three p.m. does not really allow me to do so.

(Hence, it being 7:30 on a Monday night, and I am STRUGGLING to put these words together).

So, for the month of February, I decided to challenge myself to do something I’ve never done. I decided that every weekday morning (though giving myself obvious grace), I was going to set my alarm for 4:45 and go downstairs and make a cup of coffee and work on a fiction piece I’ve had going for more years than I would like to admit.

And 20,392 words, 20 cups of coffee before work, some days an hour writing, some days 20 minutes, and breakfast mostly of Pop-Tarts, I had done it.

I started strong sitting at my desk when I would wake up, but we had a cold snap the next week, and I chose to just write in my bed with my warm coffee and blankets.

In February, for the most part, I started every day doing something that filled my soul. Some days the words would come a little easier, while other days it was like pulling teeth. But I still did it. I would go to work knowing that I had already done something that I loved. I would go to work knowing that I had chosen to get up in the darkness and sit with lowlights on and write.

I would go to work knowing I had chosen to do something for myself.

And honestly, it felt important. It felt like something I hadn’t done before.

It felt sacred.

It was something that made me question why I had never done it before. To sit in my bed with my twinkle lights on and sip a hot coffee while letting words tumble out of my brain.

I learned a lot about myself in February.

I’ve worked between 6:30-7:30 for the last six years. I am not a morning person. I cannot get up early to work out. I have never been a human who gets up to journal or read her Bible. I’m not a get-up and make a good breakfast person.

Working on my novel for a month in the morning was like all those things put together.

I worked through my relationship with God; I put thoughts I had into the mouths of the characters I was writing.

I set my day up by doing something for myself first, which is the whole point.

And it sounds so silly. It sounds so easy honestly. It sounds obvious.

Writing at 5 a.m. was putting the oxygen mask on myself first.

I really suck at that.

I would love to say that I developed an amazing habit that I wake up every morning now and write. I don’t. Because life and bad sleep and doing more than one job got in the way. The stress of having worked an entire year in a pandemic got in the way.

But I have to say that it doesn’t matter that I didn’t continue it.

The thoughts and words and moments I had in February are still with me. The knowledge that words are home and I need to hold them is still there.

Honestly even writing these words is making me emotional, because finding our home, our safe place, is so important.

That after working an exhausting year in a pandemic where I got extraordinarily little joy out of my job, and mostly just a lot of stress and anxiety, I needed to find something that brought me home to myself again.

I don’t know what brings you home. I don’t know if it’s something you don’t admit to if it’s something you do for a job, if it’s something you’re incredibly good at if it something that your everyday life makes you too tired to do daily.

I do know that we need you to find your home. We need whatever you bring out of that. We need your creativity, your leadership, your passion.

But most importantly, you need to find your home and keep it sacred. You need to carve out even a moment to sit in it and be in it.

You need that home.

Writing is my home.

And writing 20,000 words throughout twenty dark, cold mornings taught me more about my home than I will ever know.

So please, find your home.

For us.

For you.