For a long time, my life was built around survival. Not in a dramatic sense, but in the everyday way that mothers know too well — the kind of survival that requires you to keep moving even when you’re exhausted, to keep showing up even when you’re stretched thin, to keep choosing your children even when there’s nothing left for yourself.

I put myself through grad school while raising two children alone. Every day was a balancing act: work, school, parenting, bills, meals, homework, deadlines. I was building a life from the ground up, one decision at a time, one sacrifice at a time. And in that season, there wasn’t much room for anything that didn’t directly contribute to keeping us afloat.

Creativity became a luxury I couldn’t afford.

Writing — the thing that once felt like breath to me — slowly slipped into the background. Not because I stopped loving it, but because survival demanded all of me. Motherhood demanded all of me. There were years when I didn’t have the energy to dream, let alone create. My universe was small and full and heavy, and there was no space left for the girl who used to scribble poems on scraps of paper or stay up late imagining entire worlds.

But here’s the thing about identity:
It doesn’t disappear.
It waits.

It waits through the long nights and the early mornings.
It waits through the seasons of responsibility and sacrifice.
It waits through the years when you forget who you were before life required you to become everything for everyone else.

And eventually, when the dust settles — even just a little — it calls you back.

That’s where I am now.
Answering the call.
Reclaiming the parts of myself I had to set aside to survive.

I’m learning that making space for my creativity isn’t selfish. It’s necessary. It’s healing. It’s a way of honoring the version of me who held onto this dream even when she didn’t have the time or energy to chase it. It’s a way of showing my children that identity doesn’t end when life gets hard — it evolves, it deepens, it waits for us to return.

I’m writing again.
Not because life is suddenly easy, but because I’m finally choosing to make room for the part of me that has always been there, quietly hoping I’d come back.

This is my reclamation.
My return.
My reminder that survival is not the end of the story — it’s the beginning of the one I’m finally ready to write.

— Leigh C. Mitchell