It’s been slightly over a month since I have been home from my European adventure and still the feelings, the memories, the experience lives with me as if I was still there. I miss it every single day, which is probably why I have been holding off on sharing photos of my trip here – as soon as I post them I’ll know for sure that it’s over, that I’m back in Los Angeles, that cobble stone streets, lazy weekdays in quaint cafés and taking the metro have been replaced with traffic jams, absolutely no inspiration to write and a daily routine that is slowly going to amount in me having a nervous breakdown.

So I decided to make macarons.

Little did I know the amount of work I was getting myself into.

It’s funny how these little almond flour cookie contraptions took over my life. When we were in Paris, we stopped outside Ladurée, the famous French pastry shop known for inventing the macaron, but after looking at the slightly ridiculously expensive menu, we decided on another nearby café. At the time, we didn’t realize what we had missed, and I suppose the macaron challenge I presented myself with was an effort to make up for it.

It was an ambitious project, one that I didn’t over think too much, which was a good thing. After sifting and whipping and sifting and folding, my first batch, although a great effort, cracked.

That’s when I realized how incredibly important the consistency of the batter was. I had folded the batter exactly 50 times, but realized that it needed a few more turns.

Why must the French make everything so damn hard?

The second batch came out much better – any French chef would have been proud. I happened to use a Martha Stewart recipe, which in my experience, have delivered. However, if you are going to be making these, I recommend this recipe from Fabrice Bendano, pastry chef at Adour Restaurant in Washington D.C.

I’ve been ignoring this space, mostly because I’m afraid that if I sit down to write, and I mean seriously write, that my fingers will be bleeding out the ink directly from my heart, that is to say, it will be too emotional, too all over the place, too real. In journalism, you’re told to never put yourself in the story – this isn’t about you, they tell you. So you take yourself out. You never editorialize and even when you think you aren’t, your editor will make sure to let you know that you are. You take yourself out of the equation. Whereas fiction writers or even non-fiction writers perhaps feel nothing particularly odd or even wrong with putting their feelings on paper or on a blog post, journalists find it hard to express themselves.

Let me rephrase that.

I find it hard to express myself because writing about news and events and other people is something I’m confident about. Writing thoughts about myself? Not so much.

So I’ve been ignoring this space. I have photos to upload, stories from Europe to share, even recipes, but I keep putting it off. Something isn’t right.

I can’t be free, because I don’t feel free.

I’m trying to find a remedy for it.

Oh boy.

It wasn’t meant to be this way. I know, I know. I said I would upload photos and insights in to my little trip abroad and I most certainly plan on still doing that, but something has been stirring inside ever since I got back. It was there before I left – a free falling feeling, like I’m aimlessly tumbling down the rabbit hole with Alice, afraid, paralyzed and anxious. Now with a 10-day hiatus in London, Dublin and Paris – the former which always has my heart and the latter which left me enchanted beyond repair, behind me, things are more intense, more magnified and as a result more bone crushingly painful.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve opened up a blank page on this blog with thoughts bubbling at my fingertips, only to close and delete it minutes later. Even though these thoughts are spilling over in my head, something stops me from writing them. I can’t shake this fear. I can’t shake this fear that has gripped me beyond writing a silly blog post on my own corner of the interwebs. It’s taken over my life really.

The reasons? Well there are many, but in the most simplest of terms, this isn’t where I wanted to be at this point in my life, and because of this simple statement, I feel the girl I knew, the one that slept, ate and breathed writing and journalism is frozen. Not slipping away, but frozen. It wasn’t meant to be this way for me, I tell myself, but when I graduated in 2007 with a B.A. in journalism, little did I know about the impending storm the publishing world had in store for me and everyone else who graduated with and after me.

Some days I’m ok, there are even days that I’m optimistic, but then there are the days when I feel so helpless and hopeless. I have these pent up ideas – articles and images and interviews flow through my head with nowhere to go.  Not a week goes by that I don’t hear about a newspaper scaling back or a magazine shutting its doors, aimlessly throwing more writers in this gigantic cesspool of unemployment. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about going back to school for a Master’s degree to learn something while I wait for things in the world of journalism to brighten up or at the very least, level out.

I feel myself drowning in doubt, wrestling with my thoughts, trying to figure out the right course of action, fighting the blues to carry on. I read an insightful article today about this very struggle – about the will to go on, despite the circumstances – how long do you care about being a writer? the article asked. How long (and from where) do you find the strength to keep pushing?

In many ways, I have no right to complain. I am not unemployed. I work in the publishing industry, albeit online and work so hard as a freelance journalist by night, all the while trying to run an online magazine, which I do voluntarily because a) I needed an outlet for writing and producing or else you would have found me sitting at Conrad’s diner at 3 p.m. in the afternoon with the old folk eating broccoli soup and counting sugar cubes before getting hauled off to an asylum and b) because I believe it’s something that that particular community needs and deserves. It’s a civil service if anything else. But I dream up ways every day of making money from my venture and living the journalism life I’ve always wanted. You know, the usual – writing for the Los Angeles Times, researching my novel, contributing to a plethora of smart magazines, perhaps even starting another blog, and before I realize, my daydream has reached the offices of the New York Times building, which might as well be literally in the clouds for me at this point.

Something has got to give.

In the time that I first began writing this entry and now, I’ve looked through all the photos from my trip, and each one carries such enormous weight with it, such amazing memories all tangled in each other in an almost two week adventure. Europe really changed me this time. It’s been two weeks since I got back, but my thoughts are still in London. I miss my boyfriend. I never talk about my relationship here, but I miss him terribly. The world seems calmer, easier to handle, when he’s by my side. I miss him. Who else would put some snow in a bowl with my name on it?

If there was a way to lay out the thoughts in my head in a straight line, they would circle the globe three times over. That was before I took my trip to Europe, and now that I’m back – it’s ten times worse. I hope to update with photos, observations, revelations and more, but suffice it to say that I had such an amazing time that I considered canceling my flight and now, three days later I still can’t get London, Paris and Dublin out of my head.