Choose Your Own Adventure/Excuse.

Thank you for so many of you who commented on social media or emailed or tweeted telling me you miss my writing. It means a lot. There are a number of reasons I have written in awhile. I’ll let you choose which one you like the best:

1. My Mom’s dog, Rosco, is old and ailing and now wakes up 100 times a night and so I don’t sleep well and so my mornings are not as full as creative energy as they normally are when I’m rested. He was never in good health and we have no idea how old he is, but his current sleeping patterns resemble that of a newborn and so I’m basically back living the New Mom, Bad Brain life.

2. Swim team is kicking my ass. I’m the “Parent Rep” which means - for our league - I’m in charge of everything that doesn’t fall under the coach’s purview. There has been a steep learning curve because - before this year - I had only ever sold concessions. And just in case you were wondering - there’s a shit ton more to running a swim meet/swim team than just selling concessions.

3. I’m still dealing with moving my blog. If you’ll recall, it kept getting hacked (real hacked, not “I clicked a bad link” hacked) and I couldn’t afford the security I needed while self-hosting. That’s why I’m writing here, it was a quick/easy/free setup. I have finally decided to just use Wordpress.com for hosting which gives me less control over the look/function, but more security. It took me ages to decide this after testing Squarespace and Wix, but I’m sticking with Wordpress. It’s all moved to it’s new location, but it’s a mess and the domain doesn’t point there soooooooo…when I have time to do “blog stuff” that tends to be what I work on instead of writing. Which IS NO WHERE NEAR AS FUN IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING.

4. Being a working-outside-the-home woman is an adjustment. I am working part time at a library 30 minutes away and I love my job but that is now 20 hours a week that is not mine, so to speak. And while I definitely had plenty of time that wasn’t mine when I was taking care of Mom, it was more spread out instead of 4+ hours chunks of time in a day. And…I don’t get home until 6:30 some nights. I felt like this week I finally started feeling like my body and mind had adjusted a bit. I’m going to bed later which is not helping the sleep problems, but I do think I’m getting used to it.

5. My mental health has been…scattered at best. I definitely have more good days than bad now which is good. But I still have really low lows. And while some types of “lows” make me a non-stop writing fountain…these types of “lows” do not. They make me a non-stop despair fountain. Which is not as fun.

6. I started playing PokemonGO again because Wes started playing and so we do a lot of that on our free time and it’s as awesome as I remember. He and I struggle the most finding things to connect over and I’m so glad we found this again.

All of this is to say that I’m getting into a groove again. We only have one home swim meet left and now that I’ve done three, they take less out of me in terms of time and stress. There’s only 2 meets and one city meet left in the whole season. I’m definitely on the downward slope of the climb of the season and I’m feeling okay about it. I definitely think there are people that are annoyed by how much more they had to do to help me…but considering I took the job when the person who was supposed to couldn’t do it…and no one else answered the call…and so I had ZERO training…people are also being forgiving in their annoyance.

Side note: My specific brand of anxiety combined with being an ACOA (which makes me a bit of an approval-seeker/people pleaser) means that when I feel like I’m a burden I feel crushing shame. Like…if I have to “bother” someone to help me - like with this swim team stuff - I beat myself up over it FOR HOURS OR DAYS OR WEEKS OR MONTHS OR YEARS. And since I walked into this swim position with no useful skills it has been a summer of me needing to burden people with requests for help/info non-stop and OH MY GOD, the shame spirals have been out of control.

But it’s almost over and so I need less help and so the spirals are fewer and things are feeling less overwhelming. I’m getting the hang of my new “schedule” with work and I’m learning how to use evening hours like I used to use morning hours which is strange. I still don’t know what to do about Rosco, I’m scared to take him to the vet again because every time I expect the announcement: He is in pain, every day is misery. I’m basically Scarlett O’Hara-ing the whole situation and every day I put it off until tomorrow.

Hopefully I’ll be getting my rhythm back with writing again soon. Maybe even at my new (and final home?) which will be the old URL but an entirely different virtual location in the ether. The blog is moved, but the hacked links are still throughout the content so cleaning that up is going to be an undertaking of epic proportions that I’m dreading.

Thank you for your continued patience. I have a lot more to write about now that I’ve unlocked the floodgates so I’m looking forward to getting back into the groove.