05/17/2025 (Nancy Day 2): This Time Next Year

The exhaustion of yesterday has worn off, and I woke up feeling rested and ready to settle into the stillness and silence of nature today. 

I was hoping that I could take this solo adventure to gather my deep thoughts and to finally think about what’s working and what’s not working, and what I really want. I’ve established that I’m where I should be with my writing, and I intend to keep giving it my all and to see where I am by this time next year. As far as everything else, there’s only two available options that we know of: staying here in Denver, or going home. 

I honestly thought that somehow we’d find a way to make a creative living where we are now, half expecting some unknown but promising avenue to fall into our laps. But I know that’s not realistic, that we may have to take several steps back and we may have to reevaluate a lot before that form of our dreams could ever become a reality. And that reality forces me to consider the other option: going home. An opportunity that was previously unseen by either of us has recently revealed itself, and we honestly can’t stop thinking about it. But we know that it’s a ton to think about, and it’s important to consider every angle and possibility to that option. 

We owe it to ourselves to make the right decision for the both of us, to at least start down a path that will one day lead to less emotional hardship for us both. We’ve lived in alternate miseries for so long, it’s scary to consider making a great sacrifice - or number of great sacrifices - to actually do what we both want at the same time. But at the end of the day, I find myself circling back to a few key things: I miss my family, I want to live simply with minimal overhead and little to no distractions, and I want us both to be happy. 

After everything we’ve been through and all the time we’ve spent miserable and lost, we deserve all these things, I think, if we truly want them. And what if this is that knocking opportunity and we just ignore it or send it away? When will we get another chance like this, to get this close to having everything we both need? I’ve already said it before, that this desire transcends want, and it gets more true every day that we don’t actually do something about it.

So what if we just leap? 

After all, I’ve never heard of a “satiated artist.”