“I promise we’ll be back to regular updates for November.”

-Sarah A. Selene, apparently taunting the Powers that Be in the October State-of-the-Thing

This is a long post about life, loss, and self-reflection, so enter at your own risk!

If you know me in person, or at least happen to be social media buddies with my daytime persona as a mild-mannered corporate girl, you may already know that the past few months have delivered some difficult surprises. Just as I was recharging from burnout and ready to go some serious rounds with this word-monster I’ve been calling a sequel, my stepdad of 29 years was killed in a car crash.

Instead of using this space to mourn, I’m going to jump on my soapbox for a minute. I already made this point on social media, but it bears repeating, and here, I don’t have to worry about the delicate sensibilities of Facebook bots.

*ahem*

Put your fucking phone down when you’re driving. Absolutely nothing going on in your life is worth someone else’s death. If it’s that important, you need to pull over. And if you’re reading this right now and telling yourself that you’re different, that you’re special, that you can multitask better than anyone you know–there is a mountain of scientific research that says you’re wrong and you’re bullshitting yourself. My stepdad’s death was preventable. Make the right choice.

Needless to say, life got wonky for a while. I buried my nose in books because reading is a great escape and less mentally stressful than writing. I also played co-op sessions of Mario Wonder with my husband, who patiently put up with me accidentally yeeting myself into lava or getting crushed by the scrolling screen of doom on a near constant basis. Sometimes I did a little writing. Sometimes it felt like visiting with old friends. Other times it felt… well, more like this:

It didn’t help that all of this went down while I was in the middle of tackling this mess:

At the urging of several wonderful people who care about me, I tried to practice cutting myself some slack and ended up skipping the November update with hopes that December would be better and more productive.

Then our almost 14-year-old cat got violently ill all over our bed one night. He’d been sick off and on over the summer, and the vet hadn’t been able to do much for him, but he still seemed relatively normal most of the time. One new mattress and just a handful of days later, however, his condition had completely deteriorated. We did all that we could, until the kindest thing we could do was let him go.

It’s hard to understand just how much a person or a pet is woven into the fabric of your life until the thread is abruptly pulled out. At that point, it takes so much energy just to try to find “normal” again. Grief is like a waterpark wave pool controlled by a manic lifeguard: one moment, everything’s calm and you feel alright, then without warning, the waves are shoving you under and you’re fighting to breathe through a nose full of chlorine and kid pee.

The kid pee is a metaphor for sadness, of course.

I was already in a weird mental place with my writing even before all of that. I had worked myself into a state of burn-out right in the middle of trying to revise the trickiest part of the book, and continuing to stall out there because of emotional exhaustion just heightened my disappointment at missing my 2023 publication goal. I’d also let my goals for maintaining a social media and marketing presence pretty much disintegrate. I was not feeling at all good about where I’d ended up.

Through everything, though, I was lucky enough to have the support of people who love and care about me. Some demonstrated that care through hugs and encouragement, others by telling me repeatedly, until it sank into my thick skull, to take a fucking break already and get some rest.

It’s true that time heals all wounds. Or at least turns them into scarred achy spots that make us interesting and give us character. Creative funks, given enough time and coaxing, eventually end too, just like seasons and BOGO sales and the plague of unending Christmas music.

I’ve never really been one for New Year’s resolutions, but I do think the weird liminal corridor of days between Christmas and New Year’s is a perfect time to reflect and decide what you want to take with you into the next arbitrary cluster of time, and, more importantly, what you want to leave behind.

For next year, I want to leave behind the second-guessing, self-doubt, and self-consciousness. I have wasted opportunities, time, and energy to the trap of giving too many fucks.

The resulting stress and burn-out kept me stumbling when I should have been sprinting toward the things that excite me and give me purpose.

Fortunately, I’ve spent parts of this year in self-study mode. In the past, I perceived some of my traits and tendencies as being flaws and would mentally beat myself up for not being able to overcome or correct them. Now, I have a language for the things I experience and an understanding that I’m not the only one. I’ve realized that this is just how my brain is wired. Fighting myself doesn’t work. I need to learn to live more harmoniously with my brain wiring, and part of that is giving myself permission to be myself and do things, as much as possible, in the ways that work best for me.

For 2024, that means walking away from things that don’t serve my growth, build toward my goals, or feed my well-being. It means shrugging off the burdens of hesitancy and doubt. It means striking a healthy balance of fuck-giving.

Let 2024 be the year of (relative) fucklessness, because when you spend so much time worrying about things that don’t matter, you have no time & energy to care about the things that do.

And as I’ve learned all too well the past few months, our time can be so much shorter than we think.