I know you believe that the hard work, sacrifices and full days will pay off. But you know the reward doesn’t include more time, don’t you? It won’t return the time you spent shelving things for later. It comes back in riches and growing old. Your wealth will add up; your time just gets shorter.

I met a lot of people these past two years. Many advocates, a few intuitives and many more artists. Everyone is after a kind of freedom which we know exists, and which we know is waiting to be held. For the longest time, all I was ever surrounded by were people who knew what they wanted life to mean, and to feel. After a while, I had better ideas for life myself and it made disappointing realities very difficult to face.

The past three weeks I found myself at new tables, looking at new windows and writing on new notebooks. I found myself having to think hard about the kind of person I want to be and the life I want to have. I began to feel like I owed it to people who trusted me, to be that and have that, to notice that life was occurring in blocks of time and to rearrange what was important to me into the limited ones I have.

Astrology is the only mystic practice I have the time and headspace for lately, and I learned something illuminating by way of it. I have only two fire signs on my natal chart (my MC and my North Node) both of which shed insight on my life’s purpose and direction. Both of them reveal that—my softer years and my yearning for quiet aside—I crave fire in my life too. I want an empire that brings a loudness to my name and loyalty to everything I create. I want vanity and glory that follow me should I leave a trail on my way out of the city.

But only so I have bit less to worry about.

This weekend I realized how much anxiety was growing in my nerves lately. It used to happen like walls in my path: I would just stop. But these days it’s like a soft buzzing in my ears: something is wrong, something is wrong, something will go wrong. It stays in my hands as I go about my day. It turns pictures blurry every now and then, and the air hovering above my skin is a little thicker than usual. I am still moving, but something is wrong.

I was an advertising copywriter for a little under three years. I’ve now hopped aboard a social enterprise to manage the writers of their content arm. I have plenty of ideas about how to help, how to do good, how to help writers write as best as they saw themselves writing. But then I turn a page in my makeshift diary, open a Word document, click “Add New Post” on the blog… and come up empty.

I’m a writer who may have forgotten how to write.

It looks like my blog has grown weeds from neglect, but really there are a whole lot of drafts in its drawers. I don’t know how to finish them. I don’t know what story I’m trying to tell here. I don’t know what the moral lesson and wonderful conclusion of my rambles could be because I think I know what I want to say until I have to say it.

Sometimes there isn’t enough time, and sometimes there aren’t enough words.

There are too many stories though. Like Jonathan Safran Foer wrote so accurately, “I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.”