I’m building a shed because I need a place to put things.
That’s the practical explanation.

But the yard doesn’t drain well. The ground dips and swells enough to make every measurement feel wrong. I’ve been breaking down an old chicken coop I inherited when I moved in and stacking the usable pieces off to the side, unsure yet what will be salvaged and what will be discarded. The cinder blocks have reappeared, as they always do, migrating around the yard over the years, pressed into service as steps, weights, temporary solutions, en général. Heavy, inelegant, and strangely reliable, they’ve spent more time being useful than being finished.

This is not a project that rewards idealism, that’s for sure. But it does reward attention.

I’ve been thinking about how often I find myself doing work like this: not building something new from scratch, exactly, but attempting to stabilize what already exists. Adjusting for conditions I didn’t choose. Compensating for water patterns and weight and gravity. Accepting that the ground is what it is, and that insisting otherwise only leads to rot.

At some point, I realized I was thinking less about storage and more about stability. About how much margin the structure would need to survive seasons it hadn’t yet seen. The shed hadn’t changed…my focus had.

Much like any home project that easily spirals beyond the original scope, loneliness in your thirties rarely announces itself. It tends to show up the way structural issues do — alongside a life that is, by most measures, functioning well. It took me longer than I expected to recognize it. It’s the familiar stranger next door. It doesn’t arrive dramatically. It doesn’t announce itself. It lives comfortably alongside competence. I can have a full career, a capable body, a sharp mind, a calendar that fills easily, and yet I still feel the absence of something fundamental.

Not a person, necessarily. Not even companionship in the conventional sense.

It’s not the absence of people, exactly. More the absence of being meaningfully held in anyone else’s attention. Not loneliness as isolation, but loneliness as exposure. The awareness that my inner life exists largely without context, witness, or consequence beyond myself.

When I’m out there measuring and leveling, I’m struck by how much of the work is about distribution. Making sure the load doesn’t settle unevenly. Making sure no single point carries more than it can sustain over time. It’s not enough for the structure to stand; it has to keep standing through seasons of pressure it hasn’t yet encountered.

That feels… uncomfortably familiar. “Is this play about us?!”

I’ve spent a long time building myself to be structurally sound on paper. Educated. Articulate. Adaptable.
I know how to shoulder things. I know how to adjust. What I’m less practiced at is noticing when everything is technically upright but laboriously exhausting to maintain. A full-volume internal symphony that no one around me hears.

So, building the shed forces me to slow down in a way that thinking doesn’t. I can’t out-reason a slope. I can’t negotiate with water. I can only work with what’s there, layer by layer, checking and rechecking, resisting the urge to rush just because I want it to be done.

Loneliness, I’m learning, behaves the same way. Although truthfully, I’m reflecting from the far shore when I’m really still mid-current.

What I’m gathering is that it isn’t resolved by declarations or more discipline. It requires a structural audit: an honest assessment of whether the frameworks I’ve built are capable of bearing the life I’m currently living, not the one they were engineered for years ago.

There’s something grounding about committing to a physical structure that won’t care how eloquently I describe it. The shed doesn’t reward insight; it rewards follow-through. It will either hold or it won’t. And if it fails, it won’t be for lack of self-awareness. It will be because I misjudged the base.

I think that’s why this project matters more to me than I expected. And why it has me acutely aware of something older, darker, and destabilizing. The ancestral inheritance that honors shame, fear, and insignificance.

It’s a submissive acknowledgment that I’m still here, still investing, and still willing to make something stable even if it’s not beautiful, and even if it’s not shared… yet.
It’s a surrender to the revelation that utility has its own dignity. And that building something for future use is, in its own way, an act of hope.

The shed will eventually stand, unremarkable and solid (Insha’Allah), holding the things I don’t need to carry every day, and often get in the way.
Hey, maybe that’s the point. Maybe this season isn’t about expansion or reinvention or clarity. Maybe it’s about load-bearing. About making sure what remains of my journey to the other side is supported well enough to last.

That feels honest enough. Less like optimism and more like resolve. For now, that’s enough to keep me building.

— Find me where intention meets whatever answers back.