Looking back, I don’t think I fully realised what was happening while I was living through it.
May 2026 felt like one very long day.
I woke up one morning, blinked, and suddenly the month was over.
Except somehow, between school runs, housework, parenting, cat litter duties, and ordinary life, I managed to build more things in 29 days than I had in some entire years.
The strange part is that I wasn’t trying to have a productive month.
I was just excited.
Deeply excited.
The kind of excited I hadn’t felt in a very long time.
The biggest obsession was Diari Maryam.
What started as a simple idea slowly turned into a complete manuscript.
Then another.
Then another.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped counting words and started counting chapters.
I found myself spending late nights discussing story arcs, refining characters, checking continuity, designing covers, creating illustrations, and figuring out how to make everything feel like a real book instead of just a document sitting on my laptop.
The manuscripts still aren’t published.
I’m still working on the illustrations.
But for the first time in my life, I can see the finish line.
That feeling alone is difficult to describe.
When I was younger, I always thought writers were people who lived somewhere else.
People with publishing houses.
People with literary agents.
People who somehow knew what they were doing.
I never imagined that one day I’d be building an entire children’s book series with the help of artificial intelligence while sitting in my living room after putting my children to bed.
Life has a funny way of answering dreams.
Just not always in the form you expected.
Then there was Ummilennial Scrapbook.
At the start of May, it didn’t exist.
By the end of May, I owned a domain.
I was learning WordPress.
Fixing broken templates.
Creating featured images.
Setting up categories.
Figuring out archives.
Learning Pinterest.
Troubleshooting things I didn’t even know existed a few weeks earlier.
Ironically, my blog about nostalgia was built using technology my teenage self couldn’t even imagine.
Back then I was downloading Blogskins and editing random HTML snippets I barely understood.
Today I’m troubleshooting website templates and planning content calendars.
Different tools.
Same curiosity.
I also disappeared down a very unexpected AI rabbit hole.
At some point I realised I had accidentally built myself an entire creative team.
One AI helped me brainstorm.
Another helped me refine ideas.
Another checked story consistency.
Others helped create illustrations and visuals.
Twenty years ago I was customising Blogspot pages at 1am.
Today I’m coordinating multiple AI tools to help me finish books.
If teenage me could see that sentence, she would probably think I was making it up.
And because apparently life wasn’t busy enough already, BTS entered the picture too.
Somewhere in between writing blog posts and finishing manuscripts, I became increasingly involved as ARMY.
Concert rumours became ticket preparations.
Ticket preparations became presale stress.
Presale stress became actual tickets.
Somehow, after all the drama, refreshing, panic, excitement, and conversations with other married ARMY online, I ended up securing tickets for both opening night and closing night.
That still feels slightly unreal.
Looking back now, I don’t think May 2026 was the month I worked the hardest.
I think it was the month I remembered what it felt like to build things again.
Not because anyone asked me to.
Not because I had to.
But because I wanted to.
A blog.
A book.
A business.
A dream.
Maybe even a future.
For years, life felt like survival.
Necessary things.
Responsible things.
Practical things.
Then suddenly, something shifted.
I found myself creating again.
Not for school.
Not for work.
Not because somebody assigned it to me.
Just because I couldn’t stop thinking about the possibilities.
And honestly?
I haven’t felt this alive in a very long time.
Maybe that’s what I was really building all along.
Not just books.
Not just websites.
Not just businesses.
A version of myself I thought I had lost somewhere between adulthood and responsibility.
And for one strange, beautiful month in May 2026, I forgot to slow down.
Ummi Noi