Leavin’ Me Here On My Own

I know, it’s been a minute. I’ve procrastinated writing a blog post for awhile now, because I didn’t have an idea (and we all know how that turns out), but mostly I just didn’t feel like it. That’s how we end up here on the last day of September, without a blog post in more than three months. I even procrastinated writing this post until the end of the day, if that tells you how much I have not been in the headspace to blog.

But here we are. I don’t do this often, but it’s gonna get real in here. Buckle up.

My last post was just a few days before the calendar start of summer, and as I write this, it is the last day of September, a little more than a week after the calendar end of summer. It was a cruel summer, y’all. Definitely the Bananarama version, not the Taylor Swift version. I didn’t even know the Taylor version existed until just a few days ago; I’m not a Taylor Swift fan. At all. If you love her–and a lot of people do!–great! Whatever makes you happy and all that. But there are only about four of her songs that don’t make me want to barf. But I digress.

I build walls, a fortress deep and mighty, as my old friends Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel sang seven years before I was born. At the beginning of this year, someone busted through those walls like the Kool-Aid Man (this may not be my first Kool-Aid Man reference in this blog), and I couldn’t rebuild fast enough. To be honest, I didn’t really try that hard. Or maybe my wall was straw or sticks? It’s a mixed metaphor, but you get the idea.

I thought 2024 was going to be MY YEAR. After the Truly Terrible 2021, the Actually Lousy 2022, and the Just Really Meh 2023, I was ready for a GREAT year. And it certainly started that way. I was having fun and doing things I had never done before, things I didn’t know were possible for me. But they were! I felt fearless, and for someone whose control panel is run by Fear, that’s really something. I felt more like myself than I had since 2021, because I was HAPPY.

It was short-lived.

The Kool-Aid Man evaporated in mid-May. Poof, gone. It wasn’t slow. I had no signs. I had Kool-Aid one day, and then I didn’t. And man, it was hard.

And the hardest thing about that is that IT’S NOT THE FIRST TIME THAT’S HAPPENED TO ME. Seriously. The Truly Terrible 2021 started when a friend suddenly stopped talking to me, and by the end of that Truly Terrible year, several others had taken off, even though there I wasn’t the one who had fucked up. Not by a long shot. And those weren’t the first times, either.

No matter how many times that happens, it doesn’t hurt any less. You never get used to it, and you never stop thinking that it must be your fault.

I spent a lot of my cruel summer alternately sad and angry, and which I was experiencing on any given day was directly proportional to how well I’d slept, and I wasn’t sleeping well at all. But that is another story.

All of this to explain why I haven’t written a blog post, why the work on Connections stalled. But now. Now Connections is a few changes away from being ready for readers to get a first look. I’ve actually considered NOT participating in NaNoWriMo this year, not because of the minor scandal enveloping that organization, but because I only have half an idea (and I’m not sure it’s a very good one) and have not written an outline. But I have thirty-one-ish days. That’s enough time to flush something out.

And rebuild those walls. But I think I’ll skip the bricks and try steel.