I had a plan. It was not a perfect plan, and it definitely was not one of those color-coded, laminated five-year plans with quarterly goals and matching highlighters. Still, I had some general ideas about how adulthood was supposed to work. At this point, life not going according to plan feels less like an occasional problem and more like the unofficial theme of the entire experience.
I thought adulthood would follow some kind of natural progression. You grow up, figure out who you are, settle into a career, build a life, raise a family, and develop healthy routines. Somewhere along the way, you also become the kind of person who keeps the house reasonably under control and remembers to move the laundry before it develops its own ecosystem. I apparently wandered off that path somewhere, although the more I look back, the less convinced I am that I was ever really on it.
My life has included plot twists, false starts, creative obsessions, parenting chaos, medical curveballs, unfinished projects, career changes, and gaming sessions squeezed into whatever hours survive the rest of the day. More than once, I have stared at the ceiling and thought, This cannot possibly be part of the plan. Somehow, it usually became part of the story anyway.
That is what Narratively Inconvenient is about.
The Life We Were Supposed to Have
Most of us grow up with some kind of invisible timeline in our heads. Maybe we get it from family, school, television, social media, or the general belief that adulthood eventually becomes a stable operating system instead of a series of updates that keep breaking something new.
By a certain age, you should know what you want to do. Soon after that, you should have a career and some financial stability. Your house should be organized, your relationships healthy, your routines functional, and your children somehow willing to follow instructions the first time.
The list keeps going. You should meal prep, exercise, drink enough water, answer emails, remember appointments, practice self-care, and establish boundaries. Somehow, you should accomplish all of this while staying calm, grateful, rested, emotionally available, and preferably wearing clean pants.
Apparently, hobbies have rules too. They should be soothing, tasteful, and ideally attractive enough to photograph. They should not involve waking up one morning convinced you are about to become a professional watercolor artist, spending $86 on supplies before lunch, and finding those supplies six months later while searching for batteries.
At this stage, I would like to formally request an extension on adulthood. An indefinite one would be ideal.
My Plot Has Never Been Particularly Cooperative
I am a mom, a writer, a gamer, and a creative person who can convince herself that one more project will definitely fit into an already full schedule. My life has also changed direction more than once, usually without waiting for me to finish dealing with the previous change.
Some of those changes have been funny. Others have been terrifying. A few have involved staring at a school portal and wondering why educating one child requires seventeen passwords, multiple apps, several websites, printable worksheets, and the patience of someone who recently earned an advanced IT certification.
Health has created its own set of plot twists. Medical appointments, tests, medications, waiting rooms, insurance companies, and unexplained symptoms can quickly become a second job nobody applied for. Medical stories also have terrible pacing. They involve long waits, confusing paperwork, unanswered questions, and at least one person telling you to call someone else.
Then there are the times when the old version of life simply stops working. You change the schedule, rethink the career, learn something new, or rebuild the structure holding everything together. You hope the new version lasts longer than the one you just replaced.
Of course, life does not cause every disruption. Sometimes I create the problem myself. I can feel completely overwhelmed, notice one tiny gap in my schedule, and decide the obvious solution is another project. That is, incidentally, how this blog happened.
This Is Not a Perfect-Life Blog
You will not find me pretending that I wake up at five every morning, meditate for forty-five minutes, drink something green, journal about gratitude, complete a twelve-step skincare routine, and greet my family with peaceful enthusiasm. If that is genuinely your life, congratulations. I would also appreciate a detailed explanation of how you achieved it and whether sorcery played a role.
Around here, success often looks less impressive. Maybe everyone ate, nobody missed anything critical, and I remembered the appointment. Perhaps the laundry only needed to be washed twice because I forgot it existed after the first cycle.
Other days, success means finishing something I started, writing 500 words, playing a game for twenty uninterrupted minutes, or making a phone call I had been avoiding. Sometimes the accomplishment is simply getting through a day that demanded more than I expected.
Those things count. We probably do not give ourselves enough credit for them.
We put a lot of pressure on progress to look impressive. We like milestones, completed goals, dramatic transformations, and stories with neat endings. Real life rarely cooperates with that format. Sometimes progress means brushing your teeth, keeping an appointment, answering one email, or getting up and trying again after yesterday flattened you.
Small progress is still progress, even when nobody makes a motivational montage about it.
So What Are We Talking About Here?
The short answer is a little bit of everything because choosing one topic and behaving normally was clearly never going to happen.
We will talk about motherhood, medical plot twists, gaming, writing, creative projects, online school, and starting over. Career changes, learning new skills, internet culture, relationships, identity, failure, and growth belong here too. So do hobbies that briefly become full personality replacements and the ongoing challenge of trying to make money without sacrificing every remaining piece of sanity.
Some subjects will be lighter than others. I want to talk about the strange grief that comes with losing the future you pictured for yourself. I also want to talk about what happens when you begin building something different and realize it may still contain things worth loving.
Humor will be part of those conversations because sometimes laughing is the best available alternative to screaming into a pillow. Dark humor has carried me through enough ridiculous situations that leaving it out would feel dishonest. At the same time, not everything should become a joke. Some experiences hurt, some frustrate us, and some simply suck.
Real life has a questionable sense of comedic timing. Around here, the ridiculous and the serious will probably end up sharing a paragraph more often than not.
There Is No Main Character Requirement
You do not need to be a mom to belong here. You also do not need chronic health problems, a gaming habit, a writing project, a career change, or an alarming number of unfinished ideas hiding on your computer.
You only need to understand what it feels like when life stops looking like the version you expected.
Maybe you changed careers in your thirties and suddenly became a beginner again. Perhaps you are raising kids and wondering when you stopped being a person with hobbies and became the household department of missing chargers, lost shoes, and questions that someone could answer by looking slightly to the left.
Your body may have changed the rules. A relationship may have ended. You might be rebuilding your finances, career, creativity, or sense of identity. Maybe you are chasing something other people consider impractical because adults apparently may only pursue dreams when those dreams include dental insurance.
You might even look completely fine on paper while quietly wondering whether adulthood was supposed to feel different. If any of that sounds familiar, you are in the right place.
I Don’t Think the Detours Are the Problem
We often learn to treat any change from the expected timeline as proof that something went wrong. Changing direction looks like failure. Taking longer looks like falling behind. Starting over can feel like evidence that the first attempt did not count.
Maybe you dropped out, changed careers, got sick, ended a relationship, moved back home, or lost something important. You might have changed your mind, needed more time, tried something that failed, and then tried something else. None of those things automatically mean you ruined the story.
We sometimes treat those experiences like permanent red marks on a record nobody can actually locate. Yet stories rarely become interesting because everything happened exactly when expected. Something changes. Someone makes a choice, loses something, adapts, survives, or discovers that the original destination was never the right one.
I also do not believe every painful experience secretly happens for a reason. Some things are simply unfair, awful, inconvenient, or completely unnecessary. I have lived through plotlines I would happily delete from canon without stopping to ask what valuable lesson the universe supposedly wanted me to learn.
Those experiences still became part of my story. What happens next belongs to me.
Welcome to Narratively Inconvenient
This site is for lives that refused to follow the outline. It is for people who have started over more than once and parents hiding somewhere for three minutes of silence. It is for gamers whose backlog may eventually become part of the estate, creative people surrounded by unfinished projects, people sitting in waiting rooms, and anyone changing direction long after they thought they should have everything figured out.
It is also for everyone who entered adulthood expecting it to feel much more organized than this. I once assumed I would eventually feel fully qualified to manage my own life. Instead, adulthood seems to involve searching for answers online, filling out forms, making decisions with incomplete information, and occasionally asking another adult whether we are both pretending to know what we are doing.
Here, we will talk about the funny parts and the painful ones. We will talk about unnecessary side plots, moments worth remembering, and experiences we would happily erase from canon. Plans will change. Identities will shift. Bodies will misbehave, projects will multiply, children will need things, and careers will evolve.
Life rarely sticks to the plot, and apparently neither do we.
Welcome to Narratively Inconvenient.
0 thoughts on this story