The scene: New York City, May 2016. In an office overlooking the High Line and the Hudson on a sunny Thursday, late morning. Surrounded by the click, click, click of keyboards, someone else coughing, the occasional ping of a new email or a new chat. I’m sitting at my desk getting through work and trying to plan the next few weeks and months of travel and classes while firing off emails to clients and team members to move everything along so we can get out of the office on time tonight and grab a drink together. A blank draft of this post has been staring at me for days and I can’t figure out how to fill the lines: another edition of Friendly Conversations after a few doozies from A and T this week? Another draft entry to thin the 30+ piling up in that folder, half-thoughts and quotes from Instagram trying to ignite inspiration? Something else where I come to the conclusion that life is beautiful and change is good? The blank pages stare at me like a toddler in a candy store for the first time and I’m only inspired to write down one word: STUCK.

If there’s a theme for my life since March, that theme is “STUCK.” Life going into the end of 2015 made a lot of sense: I was about to start yoga training, after which obviously I’d immediately become the best-ever yoga teacher and land all of the jobs for extra money to put towards the move out of NYC, where I would of course immediately find a studio job and all of the firms back home would fall all over themselves to hire me as a consultant. I had many months of solitude and “finding myself” before the move because who wants to date when you’re trying to uproot everything? I had direction and I had a plan and it was a plan I couldn’t wait to follow. And then before training even started, the plan had started to crumble. Now that I’m passed everything I “expected” to happen this year – certified yoga teacher, auntie to two perfect little babes – and adjusted to the things I didn’t expect, I’m starting to feel like the things I’d planned and prepared for are no longer. All of a sudden I’m in this spot where nearly everything around me has changed, but nearly everything feels exactly the same.

Same apartment, same job. New(ish) boyfriend, new tattoos. Same friends, new friends. The balance of same and different in my life seems to cancel itself out, and I’m just here trying to figure out where everything is going next. Will I stay working as I’m working because I have to? Can I shape my life around the plan I had when moving was on the table? In the past five weeks I’ve gotten two more tattoos and changed my hair color, all in what is probably my adult way of “rebelling” against feeling stuck; I’m inciting change because I feel like that’s what this year was going to be about, and maybe it still is, but it doesn’t feel like it. It feels the same. But it’s not the same at all.

I just feel stuck. I’m missing pieces of a previous lifetime so much lately that I wonder if I willed an email into existence; I’m overjoyed at every ping of my phone or my gchat because my new normal is better than I could have imagined. I haven’t been practicing the same way that I normally do, and really I’ve been out of my routine with yoga for most of the year; I still practice every single day for at least 10 minutes and I don’t know where I’d be without it. Everything is changing. Nothing has changed. Life is moving forward; life hasn’t moved an inch. There are changes happening every way, day, minute, moment around me, I ran into some of them and away from others.

I’m in the middle of everything that’s static and shaking and I. Feel. Stuck.