Welcome, new readers, and also my steadfast dear readers who were here all along — thank you all so much for your support and kind words and paid subscriptions. It has been very heartening. And it will help a lot. I knew I would be surrounded by love, but I honestly had no idea. So some gratitude in the middle of the chaotic tempest of life change.
I don’t know that I’m capable of a truly coherent reflection yet. I mean, I know that I am NOT. I am still in it, going through it, all those things. So this will be more of a scratch pad from the three a.m. notes I’ve been typing when I can’t sleep. Discoveries I’ve made:
Maybe I’ve been having trouble writing my romance because an impossible obstacle lodged itself in the path of my HEA. But I know love is real. I believe in it, and I will finish writing that novel now to remind myself why.
That I am a person who has been using the term of endearment hon unironically, not like a waitress, and not just occasionally. Often at the beginning of sentences. Now it is followed by “fuck” or “damn it.” The swearing is a panoply of blue. But I’m unlearning it.
The sheer amount of documents accumulated over 20 years of marriage! Different random garbage from the both of us. Be kind, please recycle, future self. Eventually found the documents I needed, and a cat in the back of the filing cabinet. Also a print-out of another old screenplay I wrote after college.
I’m resilient. Okay, I already knew that, but in a year of hard things, this is the most seismic of changes. I reacted in the larger moment in a way I’ve been proud of, which is one of my goals. I don’t want to have any regrets about how I behave right now.
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