I’ve been avoiding writing this post all day because I don’t know what to say, and not knowing what to say makes me crazy uncomfortable.

Someone once told me that the best thing to do in times of fuzziness is start with statements of truth. Write what do you know to be absolute fact. Don’t worry about the grey area.  Ok.

• I have some friends going through deeply difficult times in their life.

• These friends are facing challenges of the heart, and their challenges scare me.

• I don’t have answers for these friends, and that’s hard for me. I wonder if I’ll face their same questions some day, and I wonder if I’ll have answers.  

• No future is totally known. No relationship is totally infallible. We cannot predict the future. Every relationship is a leap of faith. 

• Shit happens. Bad shit. Scary shit. Super sad shit. And we have to find a way to move forward.

• The support of friends is one piece of what helps us more forward. I can be that source of support. Right now maybe that’s the only “answer” my friends need.    

I think all these “truth” bullets are a super vague way of me saying that I’m scared about the unknowns of the future. I’m 4 months from being a wife. Likely less than five years from being a mother. Probably fewer years than that from being a homeowner, the namesake behind an LLC, maybe even the author of a book. “Is this apartment a good deal for the price,” or, “is this the kind of guy I’d introduce to my parents,” used to be the toughest questions on my list. Now it’s, “is this neighborhood the right place to raise kids,” and, “is this man the right person to raise them with?”

I am a fairly “sure” person. I know what I like. I know what makes me happy. I know what to wear to no matter the social situation. But it feels like the magnitude of what we now have to know in order to make the decisions coming down the pipeline recently increased 100 fold! So far I’ve still been sure, but the risks of that assumed certainty are getting really freaking high. Does that mean we don’t take them? I don’t know. My answer is currently “no.” I want to take these next, scary steps. I prefer the risks to the alternative. But that doesn’t make me less aware of the potential “shit happens” that may in fact happen.

How are we supposed to know if our “gut” is right? And how much does that matter anyway? Can everyone who falls out of love look back and say, I saw this coming? Absolutely not. Can every couple who waits too long to have a kid declare, We should have done it when we thought weren’t ready. It would have ended up fine? No.

So then is life just a series of baby steps that we make while trying to convince ourselves that there’s a master plan we can control? I really hope not because not having control makes me about as comfortable as not knowing what to say…

But here are three more things that I do know:

• I made it here through a combination of baby steps and master planning, and I really, really like how here turned out. 

• My friends made brave decisions in an effort to continue to trust their guts.

• If I find myself where they are some day, I know they’ll help me move forward, regardless of whether or not they know exactly what to day.