I’VE BLOGGED OFF and on for more than 22 years, most recently here at Dadlibbing, whose theme has been “Writing, Reading, Creativity, and Life Amidst Dadhood and a Day Job.” The idea was to explore how to be a creative while engaging with my children as a dedicated father and doing reasonably responsible full-time work.

The tl;dr of that years-long experiment is that I did okay with fatherhood and employment, and not so okay with creating. In those 22-plus years, I wrote (but never published) two novels and am maybe three quarters of the way through a third, and I made a handful of truly atrocious paintings. After a strong start, blogging – which I consider a creative activity – fell to haphazard at best. 

I could blame the whole work-and-parenting thing – a couple of my jobs have involved lengthy commutes, and I volunteered for my kids’ activities as well as doing the hands-on day-to-day stuff – but the truth is that I could have and should have had a greater creative output over the last quarter century. Even as an engaged parent and a productive knowledge worker, I had the time to write and paint and blog. I just chose to do other things with that time.

Why post about that now? I think Dadlibbing has gone as far as it could go. One daughter is well out of college and working at her first real job; the other is halfway through her first year of college. Fatherhood remains something I am deeply invested in, but in a much different way: in general, longer-term and bigger-picture as opposed to deep in the weeds and grinding through the granular details.

And so now, perhaps, it’s time to go back to the future. Among the many stops and starts on this blogging journey was a Tumblr site called T|W|D, themed “Thinking, Writing, and Dreaming in the 215” (Get it? TWD!) and not so cleverly drawn from my initials. (Also get it? TWD!) I’m heading back there for who knows how long. I hope it’s a while, that 2026 sees me embracing my creative side in ways that I never have, finishing this third (and, I think, my best) novel, painting more, blogging regularly, reading with vigor. These are all things that I love, that fill my bucket, that sustain me emotionally. Maybe – hopefully – doing them with verve and abandon instead of worrying about how I’ll get to all of these wonderful things I want to do will have a cascading effect, inspiring less thought and more doing, less wheel-spinning and more traction.

Let’s find out, shall we? See you on the other side/site. | DL