Jobs, Blogs + Butterflies

It's been approximately 58 days, 1 hour and 11 minutes since I've become a college graduate. And since that happened, I have been asked "so what do you want to do with that?" "and now what are you doing?" "do you have a job yet?" or some variation of that approximately one hundred billion times.

I get it, I totally understand. You graduate college and you get a job and then the rest of your life starts there. But the truth is, I have no idea what I want to spend five days a week for the next 35 years doing. I don't know what the goal is, I don't have a plan and I honestly think it's crazy that at 22 years old I'm expected to have that figured out.

I've always wanted to blog. I love writing and photography and I'm constantly looking for more blogs to follow and now is as good a time as any to start. I have all the free time in the world while starting the dreaded job search and plenty of ideas bobbing around my head, and blogging seems like the perfect platform to experiment with. A hobby to keep my busy in the meantime might be just the remedy for a girl without a plan.

I was just thinking about all of this the other day when something really weird happened. But in order to understand it completely, I'll have to give a little background.

Every since I was little-- I'm talking five or six-- I was obsessed with writing. I was the kid who begged to go down the pen aisle in Wal-Mart and was absolutely giddy over a brand new notebook. Taking notice of this, my poppop always told both me, and my mom, that I was going to be a writer. He read all of my silly, little stories that I wrote in school and always encouraged me to keep writing and keep thinking of things to write about. He constantly pushed me to explore my creativity, whether that meant showing me slides and slides of negatives, taking me to buy my very own set of watercolors or writing a story about a teddy bear lost in Las Vegas-- he was an artist through and through. He passed away in 2006 when I was 12 years old and to this day, I still regret how much of our time together I took for granted.

I'm a firm believer in signs. I believe that when people that you love go, they send you signs and usually right when you need them most. Poppop sends us butterflies.

So the other day, I was sitting outside in my backyard catching up on some blogs (this post actually-- about a grandpa no less) and thinking about how I really wanted to start my own, when a butterfly fluttered by and landed right on the arm of the chair that I was sitting on. It only stayed for a second; just long enough for me to notice it and make sense of the situation, but it was there and I immediately knew what it meant.

And so here I am, starting a blog because of a butterfly. Welcome.