I Don’t Need to Know (Maybe the Room is the Point)

This summer, I wrote a blog post that I finished with a line I absolutely loved:

Protect the practices that make you feel fully human. Everything else in life will happily consume the time you've set aside for them if you let it.

And then I didn't publish it.

I just didn't know, when I wrote it, that life was about to ask whether I meant it. Apparently, there were a few more paragraphs it wanted to add.

I had quite a few gigs this summer and I attended a networking event for the first time since taking on live activations. I could definitely compile all those photos and videos and share them here. But, the paragraphs I want to share today have a weightier context that, if you’ve been following my journey, I think you’d rather see…

The Blog Post That Wasn’t

It started with two missing spindles. They weren't just any spindles, either. They were my two most special: a Golding Silver Lace and a Bosworth Moosie. Both were treasures to me, and both had been well outside my price range when I bought them years ago, before my “big girl job” came along.

Long before Stacey Scribbling became what it is today, I was Weekend Knitter. I knitted, played with fiber, and eventually learned how to spin yarn by hand. I loved it all.

The Golding was my "wish" spindle. At the start of my spinning journey, I'd promised myself I would get it for myself when I felt I'd become proficient enough to deserve it. The Bosworth Moosie was a different kind of prize. Getting one required making it onto a coveted spot on a purchase list and then patiently waiting my turn.

Over time and a few major life changes, though, spinning became one of those things I was always going to get back to. I got my big girl job and saw a lot of growth in many areas of my life. Life was doing its thing.

Then, toward the end of last school year, I started carrying my two favorite spindles back and forth to school every day. I kept thinking I'd find a moment to spin and begin reintegrating the practice into my everyday life.

I never did.

Between teaching and running errands over lunch break, the day was just too busy. Then summer arrived, and I couldn't find the bag.

I searched the house. I wondered whether I'd left it at school or whether it had fallen somewhere during one of those frantic school days and simply never made it home. I grieved it. But, eventually, I started making peace with the possibility that I'd never see those spindles again.

Still somewhere in all that searching, something began bothering me even more than losing them. I'd spent an awful lot of time waiting to do something I already knew I loved. It made me wonder how much of a life can disappear that way.

So I stopped waiting.

I bought another Golding. It’s a tiny two-inch spindle called a Heart of Gold. I even reached out about purchasing another Moosie. I pulled out my spinning wheels and bought some beautiful fiber to spin up. I had decided I was going to spin again, whether the old spindles ever turned up or not.

And then, almost magically, I found them.

Apparently, some very responsible version of me had put them away safely in my office closet and neglected to tell the rest of me where she'd put them.

I was relieved, but by then something more important had already happened.

I’d chosen to return to something I loved.

That experience became the blog post I didn't publish.

Because not long afterward, I resigned from my day job.

Leaving Security Behind

There was no dramatic plan to quit teaching and ride off into the sunset as a full-time artist any time soon. Life isn't nearly that tidy. For years, I had been balancing teaching, caregiving, Stacey Scribbling, gigs, family, and all the ordinary responsibilities that fill whatever space remains. I kept making it work. Or, I was trying to.

Every year, I adjusted something. Every year, I tried to find another way to fit all the pieces together, and I intended to do the same thing this year.

But this time, the pieces simply would not fit.

My responsibilities at home and as a caregiver needed something different from me. The logistics of being physically present at school were becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile with the life I actually had. I had to acknowledge what I didn't particularly want to acknowledge: I couldn't keep doing everything the same way.

So, a few days before we were supposed to start back to school, I resigned.

I'd love to tell you I submitted my resignation, closed my laptop, and was immediately overcome by peace.

I heaved into a bag. Just for a minute. Maybe a few days.

For someone who had just written a lovely, revelatory blog post about not waiting to live, actually changing my life turned out to be way less poetic.

Apparently, I am far more attached to security than I realized.

I've spent years building a business. I've taken risks. I've walked into rooms where I didn't know anyone and performed live. I've learned skills at the last minute because an opportunity required them. I've quoted jobs I wasn't sure I'd get. I've driven to unfamiliar places with a car full of equipment and trusted that I could walk into an event and do what I'd been hired to do.

I've watched a love of beautiful lettering become a business that has given me experiences I couldn't have imagined when I started. So I thought I understood risk.

Maybe I understood one kind.

But, leaving a regular paycheck is another.

There is a kind of ease in knowing where you're supposed to be Monday morning. There's comfort in knowing that a certain amount of money will appear in your bank account on a certain day.

And I am a person of faith. I believe God provides.

I also knew exactly when my next paycheck was coming.

Apparently, both of those things were true.

So there I was. No beautifully packaged "I quit my job to follow my dreams" announcement. No five-step plan for reinventing my life. Just me, my faith, my family, my business, my responsibilities…and a whole lot more space on the calendar than I was accustomed to seeing.

Then something interesting happened.

Embracing the Unknown

By Day Three, I had a lead that turned into a booking. It was a small gig, but it was paid—and it was with a new-to-me client. It wasn't enough to replace a salary or prove that everything was going to be fine, but it was enough to make me notice.

Then came Day Four.

My former employer reached out to ask whether I'd be interested in coming back on a seasonal, project basis to help with some special projects. Not teaching this time, but publications: things like the school newsletter and yearbook, maybe some social media posts.

There are reasons that particular offer meant more to me than I can explain here. Maybe I'll tell that story someday. For now, I'll just say that sometimes the things that make us pay attention arrive in the most peculiar packages.

Suddenly, instead of feeling as though I'd stepped off the edge of something, I began to wonder whether I was simply seeing the first few pieces of a different kind of life beginning to arrange themselves.

Not one new job replacing the old one, but something else.

Maybe meaningful project work here and a Stacey Scribbling event there. Caregiving with enough flexibility to better support the growing needs of my daughter and my family. Time to practice my calligraphy, not because there's an order waiting, but because I want to become better. Time to write. Time to spin.

Time, perhaps, to discover what Stacey Scribbling can become when it isn't perpetually being squeezed around the edges of everything else.

I don't know yet, and maybe that's the part I'm being asked to become comfortable with.

Because there was another idea hiding inside that unpublished spindle essay…What happens when the hobby becomes the paycheck?

Making things with my hands used to be something I did simply because I loved doing it. Now, quite often, when I make something beautiful, there's a client, a deadline, and a deliverable attached to it.

And I love that. There is still something astonishing and satisfying about being paid to make things with my hands.

But I'm also realizing that I need things I love that aren't required to earn their keep.

Spinning doesn't need to become another business. I don't need to resurrect Weekend Knitter, sell handspun yarn, or develop a content strategy for wool.

I can just spin.

Calligraphy can be work and still sometimes be practice. Writing can lead somewhere…or nowhere. Creativity doesn't always have to justify the time it consumes. Maybe that's particularly important for those of us who have managed to turn something we love into something we sell.

And maybe it's important for another reason too.

Despite what social media would have us believe, very few of us are one-dimensional people. I'm a calligrapher and engraver, a business owner, a caregiver, and a former art teacher. I'm also someone who loves beautiful tools and beautiful letters and who can lose an unreasonable amount of time looking at a meticulously crafted spindle, a masterwork, or a beautifully written piece of calligraphy.

I'm someone who likes making things. Someone who writes. Someone who believes God is involved in her life while also occasionally being terrified about what that life is doing.

All of those things can be true at once.

Maybe searching for a "new normal" isn't really about finding the next single thing that will define me. Maybe it's about allowing more of those things to coexist.

Maybe it's about making room for capacity. Not so I can immediately fill that room with more things to do, but so I have enough of myself available for the things that matter when they need me.

And I'm paying attention because a few things are already beginning to fall into place.

I'm careful about saying that. I don't want to turn a new client and an unexpected work conversation into some tidy formula in which taking a leap of faith guarantees an immediate reward. Faith doesn't work like that, and life certainly doesn't.

What’s Next?

I don't know what happens next.

But I do know what it felt like to make a decision I believed I needed to make, be absolutely terrified by it, and then watch a few small possibilities appear almost immediately afterward.

Enough to make me wonder.

A few weeks ago, I thought this summer was teaching me not to wait to live. Maybe it was. But lately, I've been wondering whether that was only the first lesson.

Eventually, you stop waiting. You make the decision. You close a door. And then you find yourself standing in a life that hasn't quite taken shape yet.

That's where I am now: a little scared, a little excited, still figuring it out, and still trusting.

Perhaps I'm learning that faith isn't always knowing what's going to happen next. Like my spindles, sometimes it's being willing to move forward without requiring that knowledge first.

The old version of my life gave me a lot of answers. This one is giving me questions.

It's also giving me pause to reconsider some ideas that I subscribed to, like the idea that having a full-time career was somehow part of what made me a "big girl" in the first place.

It’s giving me more time to be present.

But more than all of that, it's also giving me room.

And right now, I'm beginning to think the room might be the point.

I don't know how this story ends yet.

Just enough has happened for me to stop believing I need to know.