Beyond 30: The Next Chapters

"Slow down, you're doing fine. You can't be everything you want to be before your time." A wise woman recently told me that I've spent my entire life looking ahead toward the future instead of living for the moment, the here and now. The present has always felt  unsettling  because who I am now is not who I want to be. "Future Me" is everything I'm not - beautiful, successful, happy; s he is always ten steps ahead of me. Though I certainly have days where I do feel those things, those moments seem to whisk away faster than they arrive, a brief haze of what could have been if things had worked out or if I'd done things differently, or if I'd made different choices.  Failure to live up to my own unrealistic expectations may in fact be the root cause of my troubles.  Perhaps my utter silence on social media has been a sign but I tend to have a "bury my head in the sand" mentality about dealing with difficult or unexpected situations. N...

I think I'm realizing that I have a food addiction.  The process of writing this novel has, at times, been mentally exhausting, emotionally taxing, and just plain difficult. There are days when I'm working on a scene or chapter and it becomes glaringly obvious that the root of all my troubles is food.  Lately, I've been planning my entire day around it. I'll wake up thinking about breakfast and be inwardly preparing for lunch; sometimes, I'll ask Tom six hours ahead of time what he wants for dinner just so I can plan for how much I want to eat and still hopefully be within my food budget. There's even a new app on my phone that helps me track my calorie intake and exercise; and, on the days when I'm actually trying to be intentional about what I'm eating, rather than avoiding the topic entirely, I obsess over documenting every single calorie. This earnest desire to change my life has turned into an obsession.  Early last year, when I began seeing a thera...

In a time when political unrest is flooding my newsfeed, it feels almost selfish to give attention to other, less important matters. Tom and I have been on the lookout for a new home that would save us money and put us closer to the restaurant for months - and I mean months. I think I started looking for a new place in November with little luck since then and to continue life as normal, as though we aren't potentially on the verge of WWIII, feels like a step towards intentional ignorance. How can one go about daily life and plan for the future when the distinct possibility that it could all come crumbling down around us looming in the too-close-for-comfort distance?  I suppose part of the human spirit is the willingness to persevere in spite of unfavorable odds.  And in that spirit, I have been wildly restless and distracted. Last week, I awoke to a notification from Zillow, one of the dozens that I've looked at over the past four months, with the usual gut feeling that it wou...

Life has been good lately.  Over the past few weeks, I've come quite naturally into a routine of getting up early, hitting the gym with Casey Sue, coming home to work, and spending the rest of my free time in the space of self-care and personal development. It has been revitalizing.  There are days that I feel lost in the "what ifs" of my future, of how this project could ultimately fall apart and I'll dive headfirst back into a pit of self-loathing after long and seemingly futile attempts at fixing myself but, over the past few weeks, those moments have been fewer and further between. Though I don't wish to lay claim that working out has made an immediate and noticeable improvement in my life, the benefits seem to be overshadowing any doubts I have. Lately, I wake up and I want to be doing things. I look forward to feeling good in my body by exercising and I look forward to coming home to tell a story, even if the process is at times arduous and emotionally drain...

The funny thing about writing is that sometimes you'll write out pages and pages of work in an attempt at crafting something beautiful or you know... well written... and end up scrapping the entire thing.  Last week, on my birthday I wrote out a blog that talked about Tom and I catching covid over the holidays, my guilt at not having done any work for three weeks while we were both sick, the feeling of imposter syndrome as I've been working on getting back into the "swing of things", and all manner of updating you about the book in addition to my weight loss progress.  And I scrapped all of it.  Over the last few months, I've taken half a dozen workshops, participated in writers groups and critique groups, and I've learned a lot. Though it is certainly the tip of the iceberg in terms of what I believe I will learn over the next year about the craft of writing a novel, there are things I've gleaned so far.  One is that sometimes you just have to know when t...

It has been just over a month since I last posted and since then, I have spent nearly every day writing, trying to treat the process almost like a full-time job. And despite all the workshops, writers groups, and critique meetings, every single day I feel a little less convinced that I can do this. Though I certainly have my moments of clarity and conviction, more frequent are the days where I've been sitting in front of the computer for three straight hours trying to shape a story into something that is relatable, beautiful, and relevant. I'm trying to write a story that I would want to read. And I feel in over my head.  Earlier in the year when I had first begun therapy in an effort to figure myself out and make better choices for my mental health, one of the things that I learned is that my need for control impedes my ability to start projects. It's turning out to be true that my deep fear of failure has begun to take control of my hands and of my thoughts, coloring ever...

So, you may have read that I am writing a book ( here are the first unedited paragraphs if you were interested ) and so far the process has been a bit..well..intimidating. Over the last couple of weeks, I've taken a half a dozen writing/publishing workshops online and while these have proved very useful, it's evident that I've got a lot of work to do if I want to be a successful and more importantly published writer. It's not as though I was expecting this entire process to be easy because if it were, everyone would publish a book. There is, however, a lot more to it than I originally anticipated. Writers are not merely conveyors of a story; they are, at their heart, marketing gurus (which I am not). Selling a book also means selling your platform, building an audience, and connecting with the core of people that you want to read your story.  So, that's what I'll have to do.  And I kind of hate it.  I am really not much of a social media person. Over the years, ...