That’s certainly weird, so I’ll tag @manta2g so she can check it out.
But you should also be able to go to your own profile page, and at the top of that, there should be a line that says “Write a public message on your own feed” and if you click that, you can put a status on that.
What Forum theme are you using? It showed for me on the Dynamic theme as well, and I think it’s the default or Dynamic as our only options for the moment.
You just click on the sentence that reads “What’s on your mind?” above the status updates, at the top of the column. That opens a window which will let you type in whatever you want, and lets you add emojis that will display when it’s read.