Here it is, almost halfway through another month of 2026.
My last blog, on January 31, brought back a lot of emotions and memories as I wrote it. Some things are easy to put into words. Others seem to sit somewhere between your heart and your fingertips, and somehow, when you finally begin typing, everything you have been holding inside comes pouring out.
So today, I just wanted to touch base.
I hope your new month is going well. I hope, little by little, 2026 is improving for you.
Tonight was a quiet and lonely evening for me.
I guess that is what life granted me this year. Definitely not how I had expected to spend my evening, but sometimes the quiet gives us time to reflect — whether we want that time or not.
And tonight, I reflected.
I had expected to put one particular dream to rest this year. To finally accept that it wasn’t going to happen, lay it down, walk away from it and leave it there.
I thought I could.
But it’s harder than I thought it would be.
Some days I can convince myself that I have accepted it. That I’m okay with letting it go.
And then there are the quiet nights.
Those are the nights when it hits a little harder than I realized it would.
Maybe that’s the thing about dreams that once meant so much to us. We don’t simply wake up one morning and stop caring. We don’t flip a switch and suddenly forget what we hoped for, prayed for, planned for or imagined our lives would look like.
Sometimes letting go is a process.
Hopefully, as the weeks pass, I can do it.
I realize more and more that time does not stand still for any of us. Nor do we have some magical time machine that allows us to go backward and change the course of our lives.
Would I change some things if I could?
Of course I would.
I think most of us would.
But then I think about how boring life might be if we could go back and rearrange everything so that every hope came true, every dream worked out exactly as planned, every wrong turn was corrected and every heartbreak was erased.
I don’t think that’s the way life is supposed to happen.
Maybe some of our greatest lessons are found in the things that didn’t work out.
Maybe some of our strength comes from the dreams we had to release.
And maybe sometimes we don’t understand why something didn’t happen until much, much later.
Or perhaps there are some things we will never completely understand.
But wherever you are as you read this, I hope you’re enjoying February.
No matter where you live, no matter what the weather looks like outside your window and no matter what life looks like inside your four walls, I pray you’re happy.
I pray you’re healthy.
And I pray you’re finding reasons to smile.
Thank you for following along with me on this blog journey.
I pray I make you laugh and smile more often than I bring tears or sadness. But I also pray that somewhere in these words, you recognize a little piece of yourself.
Maybe you’ve had a dream you had to let go of.
Maybe you’ve spent a quiet night wondering how life ended up looking so different from what you once imagined.
Maybe you’ve had to accept something you desperately wanted to change.
And maybe — just maybe — something I write can help you feel understood in some small way.
That’s one of the reasons I keep writing.
And honestly, if there’s ever a topic you’d like me to chat about, please send me a private message. You never know — something you’re going through may be exactly what someone else needs to hear about too.
Before I close, I simply hope the rest of February is really good to all of us.
I pray we find joy every single day — even if some days we have to look a little harder for it.
I pray we can put our fears, our traumas and our sadness behind us just enough that they don’t steal today’s joy.
No, our days will never be perfect.
We all know that.
And maybe the hardest lesson I’m learning right now is that finding joy doesn’t mean everything worked out.
It doesn’t mean the dream suddenly hurts less.
It doesn’t mean I stopped wishing things could have been different.
And it certainly doesn’t mean I have all the answers.
Maybe finding joy simply means deciding that something I didn’t get — even something I wanted with all my heart — doesn’t get to take every beautiful thing that might still be waiting for me.
That’s hard for me to write.
Because when you’ve carried a dream for a long time, putting it to rest can feel like you’re putting a little piece of yourself there with it.
But maybe we don’t have to bury the part of ourselves that dreamed.
Maybe we only have to release the picture we created of exactly how that dream was supposed to happen.
There is a difference.
I’m beginning to understand that.
I don’t know what the rest of this year holds.
I don’t know what unexpected turns are ahead.
I don’t know which prayers will be answered the way I hope, which ones will be answered differently, or which dreams may quietly be replaced by something I haven’t even imagined yet.
But I do know this:
I’m still here.
I’m still writing.
I’m still hoping.
I’m still trying.
I’m still believing there are memories left to make, places left to go, people left to meet, laughter I haven’t laughed yet and moments I haven’t lived yet.
And perhaps that is where hope begins again.
Not by pretending the old dream didn’t matter.
Not by pretending it doesn’t still hurt sometimes.
But by believing that losing one dream does not mean losing the possibility of beautiful days ahead.
So maybe I don’t need to know what comes next.
Maybe, for now, I just need to keep walking toward it.
One day.
One prayer.
One laugh.
One unexpected blessing.
One little piece of joy at a time.
And if you’re trying to let go of something too, I hope you’ll walk toward those joyful days with me.
We may not be able to go backward.
We may not be able to rewrite yesterday.
But we’re still here.
And tomorrow hasn’t been written yet.
Seeking joyful days ….. with …..
gussiewrites.com
