A few weeks after my mother-in-law passed away, the woman who had lived with us and been part of our everyday life, I found myself needing somewhere to put my mind. There was so much on my plate. Grief, logistics, everyone else’s feelings to hold along with my own. I needed something that wasn’t about loss. Something that was mine, and positive, in the middle of a season that felt like anything but.
So I started brainstorming names for a project I hadn’t fully defined yet. I knew two things for certain. I wanted to do something for myself, something that was actually mine. And I wanted it to be something other people could see themselves in too, not just a personal outlet, but a place someone else might read and think, me too.
I sat with name after name for a few days. Honestly, I don’t even remember most of what I considered and rejected along the way. Nothing was landing. Then I got to The Rebuild Diaries, and it just clicked. Immediately. The kind of clicked where you stop looking any further because you already know.
Diaries made sense to me the second I thought of it. I was a kid with an actual diary, the cheap kind with the little plastic lock that anyone could have opened with a bobby pin if they’d tried hard enough. I loved writing, even then. There was a stretch of my life where I genuinely thought I’d grow up to be an author. Putting my thoughts into words has always been how I process things, how I make sense of what’s happening around me and inside me.
And “rebuild”… that part wasn’t hard to figure out. That’s what I was doing. Not in one dramatic, obvious moment, but quietly, in the middle of grief and everything else life had stacked on top of it. I needed to build something, even something small, while so much else felt like it was falling apart or already had.
So that’s where the name came from. Not a big lightning bolt moment. Just a few days of sitting with it, a childhood diary with a lock that never really locked anything, and a very real need to focus my mind on something that felt like mine, and something that might matter to someone else too.
The story is still being written.
This is simply the page where I decided to begin.
The Rebuild Diaries 