Pivoting

(This is just a context post so I feel comfortable writing after having taken an incredibly long break from posting. Read if you are confused/curious about me, but not if you want to find amusing content.)

I lived in Norman, OK, from 1999 until 2018. I had expected to live in Norman pretty much indefinitely. The state had invested a lot in me through my college years (yay, scholarships!), and I had put down roots that helped drive me to give back. Family and friends and familiarity made it easy to be there, even when there were tornadoes and earthquakes and political nonsense made it hard to stay.

When I last updated this blog, I was sitting in my living room in Norman. Trump had been in office a few weeks. I still worked at the University of Oklahoma in a college IT department. I had just begun to take a day off work each month to advocate for education funding at the state capitol. It seemed like a good way to be proactive in alarming times.

Things escalated quickly.

By the end of that summer, I had quit my job and was a campaign manager for a state senate special election. I spent the next year and a half working as campaign staff for state and city-level campaigns in Oklahoma. I stood with the teachers during the walk out. I knocked doors. I analyzed data. I tried my very best to make change. Some candidates lost. Some candidates won. I’m proud of my work.

And of course, in the middle of the mid-term elections, life threw me a curve ball. My spouse was offered a dream job opportunity in Charlotte, NC. This was an opportunity not just for him, but for my daughter to have access to more diverse experiences. It was an opportunity for all of us to live in an even bluer dot. And it was a chance for me to live somewhere less prone to drought (no, really, I am paranoid about long-term water availability).

I have spent the last year grappling with the guilt of leaving Oklahoma after having committed to making change. I have experienced what it is like to try to make change remotely (apparently it is not my thing–to the surprise of few). And I have started to put down roots here in Charlotte.

I am restarting this blog because I’m trying to focus on my own creativity and how I can best use it to help others. I have been painting and drawing quite regularly since the first of the year, so there’s going to be art and the shenanigans that goes into that. There’s going to be politics, because the world is on fire. And there’s going to be musings on Tai Chi and meditation and gardening and parenting, because I’m very lucky that life is also full and wonderful when I don’t spend all of my time staring into the politics-fire.

So this is my pivot post–from sporadic rambling to regular… rambling. From Oklahoma to here. From whatever this all is to whatever is next.