Adam Oster, Novelist

If you’ve been paying attention, 2022 has already been a pretty huge year here at the Oster household. As of yesterday, I officially received an email allowing me to pay to download a digital version of my diploma (because…after paying $40 just to graduate, the opportunity to download a PDF is apparently not included) AND we bought a bakery, not to mention all of the little things going on all around that.

Which means that I’ve been at this point of late where I’ve been spending an awful lot of time thinking about the future and what it means for me.

Obviously I do that a lot in general, but I’ve been doing it even more of a lot as of late.

And the truth of the matter is that I still don’t have any freaking clues about what my future should look like.

Yeah, sure, so now that we have a bakery, that’s going to be a huge part of our future for the time being, especially until we can get some more employees in there and increase the cooler space and a billion other little improvements that need to happen. And yes, now that I have a degree, that means I should probably find a new job that can take advantage (financially) of that level of higher education.

But the truth of the matter is that none of these quite fit within the vibe of where I thought I’d be at this point in my life. Not that these are things I’m unhappy with. I’m actually pretty excited for what the future has in store, but I’m also trying to figure out how I got here.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m 100% the reason we now own a bakery. I’ve been supporting (read: pressuring) my wife to do this for as long as I’ve known her, so although there have been some exhausting nights over the past month since we pulled the trigger, this is exactly where we need to be so that she can live out her dream. But I still struggle with what my own dream is…and how to get there.

This has been part of the issue with me populating the blog here as of late. It’s not that I don’t want to write, it’s that I’m not sure that this is the best usage of my time for my creative outlet during this period in which my available time for creative outlets is exceptionally minimal. I’ve actually been questioning whether writing is the place where I need to be putting my creative efforts in general nowadays. Because, well, although I enjoy it, it’s not exactly something that gets much for a return on the time investment outside of mental health (which is a big one, don’t get me wrong).

And…well…that makes me a little sad. But at the same time, if I’m being completely honest, I haven’t done much for writing at all these past 5 years. So…I don’t really know what to say about it.

But…that’s where I’m at, and right now, I can’t promise I’ll keep populating this space because it’s taking up time that I simply don’t have. Which is a really crappy thing for me to actually put to the page here.

Especially since there are about a dozen writing projects in different levels of development that I’d actually really like to get back to…