“How are you?” “What’s been going on?” “Nice to meet you! What do you do?”

All of the many, innocuous small-talky questions are unusually hard for me to answer. I pause, make an odd face, probably vocalize the “UHHHH” in my brain. I never end up on the receiving end of the clever “find a better way to talk to people” introductory queries that I see suggested so often on the internet. Instead, I am there to give the overly long answer to what I know the asker hopes would really be 3-10 words in length.

I’ve changed my path and my career many times over in these last 10 years. Unless you’re in touch regularly, which hardly anyone is, I’m going to give you a fairly different answer every time. As well as an explainer of why this, why not the last thing any longer, and what else might come of such an endeavor.

I answered the question of what I do just last night by describing myself as someone who produced video games for over a decade, did interior design for 4 years, and is currently learning how to code websites for the sake of making money once again. When I heard these words myself, I think: “She sounds like a flake. Someone who can’t make up her mind. A boat without a rudder or an anchor.”

Then again, I remember what life was like 10 years ago, and the 10 years before that. I did a thing, and I was a person. That’s it. I was busy as hell, had a home and family that I maintained, and a career that I worked so hard at to do all of the things: excel personally, make a difference to my team, and goshdarnit carve out a space for myself in that industry. I had no idea that I was running in circles and had no chance at improving anything in my life in any significant way by doing things all of these ways. I was rotting in my little boots.

It took a tragedy for me to pull the ENOUGH cord and escape long enough to improve just one thing. Not even a big category thing. Just doing real work to adjust how I felt about an event. I came out feeling good. I did more work on a couple more things, and felt even better. I was beginning to breathe, open my eyes, and see the circle I had carved into the dirt. The deep rut of my own dearly-intended design. I needed to do more.

Today, I let go and move on when I need to. Even when it hurts, even when the thing I’m letting go of is still my dream. Because I don’t want to stink with rot again until I’m actually in my grave. Change is hard, and lord knows I wish I could be a tidy box of easy answers and summations. But I’m not. I wasn’t as a child, and I’m not now. Those in between dead years were the aberration. Today, I will do as a child and flow to what needs to be next. It isn’t my place to master one thing at one time. However, with more time, all of those building blocks of those many things add up to quite a lot of strength across many avenues.

So my best answer to what I’m doing is, “I’m learning a lot.” Which is always true. And what I do is, “I do a lot of things.” And what I’ve found is that I’m happiest when I am doing a lot of things. I’ll never again be just a person, doing a thing. I’m here to keep learning and growing.