Holy moly, me oh my. It’s been awhile, hasn’t it?
2017 was hard…for a myriad of reasons.
But it was about choosing joy. I got on some meds for my anxiety and depression and started seeing a therapist.
I stopped working on Little Foxes, at the suggestion and guidance of my therapist. We set a deadline of 60 days for me to work on it as much as I could and then I needed to shelve it for awhile. It was during this time that I got the idea for a romance novel. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love to read books about super dirty sex and over the top love…I just never thought I could write them, you know?
But that’s what I started for a nano project and I’m still working at it. Chipping away a little bit at a time. This WIP brought and continues to bring me so much joy. It’s easy, well, I mean writing is never easy but this story is easier to tell. I can’t decide if it’s because it’s fun and funny, all tropey and just over the top or if something inside me has changed. I’ve gone from struggling to get 200-500 words per writing session to 1500-3000+ per session.
Little Foxes is a very important story to me and there’s a lot of pressure (internally) to get it right. It’s a huge exploration of grief and relationships and finding yourself when everything you thought you knew and the person you thought you were has been absolutely decimated. It’s about crawling out of that deep hole of grief and despair…and maybe I can’t get it right because maybe I’m not there yet. Maybe I’m not who I need to be or where I need to be to tell the story in the way that I want to. It’s taken a lot of therapy and to accept that it’s okay. It’s okay that I’ve spent years working on something that isn’t finished. It’s okay not to be perfect. It’s okay to know that something isn’t working and come back to it later. Or not ever come back to it.
The most important thing to me is that I never get back to where I was emotionally and creatively in the beginning of last year.
2017 pushed me and stretched me and made me search for and redefine what joy looked like for me. While I’ll never be able to list or describe all of it, there are the things that stick out the most from the past year.
· Wellbutrin and therapy and more good days than bad.
· Being able to come home and immediately dive into cooking dinner or doing homework with Alison instead of needing 20 minutes to crawl in the bed and stare at the ceiling.
· Finally sleeping through the night.
· Reading whatever I want to read and logging it on my goodreads anyway, no matter how dirty the title is.
· Making new friends and reconnecting with old ones.
· Book signings and writing workshops and groupme convos.
· Texts from Susanne and Kati.
· Messages from Meghan and Muffy and Victoria.
· Amanda’s dog finally, begrudgingly accepting me.
· Tuesday night writing with Amy.
· Midnight texting sessions with Kristin.
· Trips to Pie Lab with Jeff, even the times when we get there to find that they have inevitably sold out of all of the good pies.
· Alison reading a book to me all by herself.
· Lunch dates at Chuy’s with Amanda.
So 2017 was wrapping up and I had found lots of things that made me actually feel joy, but I didn’t have a clue what to focus on for 2018. My therapist suggested making a vision board. I balked at first because one, I’m not crafty AT ALL, and two I had no clue what that would even look like for me. 2017 felt like a lot of things were ending. Relationships and feelings and creatively. So with all of those things in mind I grabbed some magazines and pink poster board and printed off things that made me happy and created a vision board for 2018.
Almost immediately after choosing Dream and Conquer the word dream has popped up everywhere, just like Joy did in 2017 and Brave did in 2016. I think it’s the universe’s way of telling me I made the right choice and I’m exactly where I need to be. I’ve started taking pictures every time I see the word dream around me and can’t wait to see how many there are by the end of the year. Speaking of that, I saw this sign in Homegoods right after I chose dream and conquer:
It made me laugh and I took a picture and sent it to my therapist. I felt like it was the universe challenging me, reminding me that nothing worth having comes without work. To achieve my dreams means I’m going to have to dig deeper and push myself harder than ever before. It’s time to dream more and dream bigger and to conquer some of my demons while still becoming brave and choosing joy. It’s time for adventures and meeting goals and writing more and being a better friend to myself and others. I’m so tired of feeling like a failure.
But I’m still here. And that’s not something I would have thought possible at the beginning of 2017.
***I drafted this in January and forgot to post it. I found it in my drafts folder today and am happy to say that everything I wrote then still applies over 2 months later. Things can change so quickly, you know. I'm still making significant progress with smutnovel and daring myself to have some big lofty dreams. It feels silly sometimes so I try to temper it with smaller obtainable dreams, like dreaming of a clean kitchen or having the laundry all caught up, even if it's just for a second.
There's something about dreaming big that makes me feel raw, exposed, and vulnerable. I'm trying to sit with the feelings though, trying to figure them out rather than pretending that I don’t feel that way. It's a battle some days to allow myself to dream. Daydreaming feels wasteful somehow, like I could be pouring that time and energy into something else, like the 99 million other things that need to be done.
Last year during the really bad times Amy finally talked me into reading A Court of Thorns and Roses (series) by Sarah J Maas. The second book in the series, A Court of Mist and Fury, quickly became one of my all time favorite books. As in I have it in hardback, ebook, and audiobook. It's that serious lol. I can't tell you why I connect so strongly to this book, why it brings me so much comfort, but I've read/listened to it probably 20 times in the past year. I was thinking about this one night on my way home from Nashville and I realized that the theme of dreams/dreamers is a huge part of the book. Maybe I subconsciously picked dream because of that? I don't know.
I don't know how to wrap this up nicely. Since this is (as always) just a free flow of thoughts and feelings and ramblings, I'll end this by sharing two of my favorite quotes from ACOMAF:
titsay
discoholicmusic
germansingergirl
stormborns
2087
gracieabrams
snowghoul
