I used the lockdown as my personal creative vortex and compiled the road trips, therapy sessions, business trips, panic attacks and all the rest into a book. And that book was published in June 2022 and is available on Amazon/Etsy now! What follows are the first 2 chapters.
Two boulder-sized milestones – stacked on top of one another, heaped on top of me. The kind of life-altering moments that can exhaust your emotional faculties so completely that you need a few weeks of alternating deep tissue massages and tear-soaked therapy sessions just to get back to baseline. And I got a twofer over one long weekend.
It’s never really about the things. Delightful distractions, the leather smells rich and the cashmere feels soft but after the novelty of the luxury wears off, we’re all still just electric meatsuits traversing a watery orb, bumping up against each other trying to make sense of it all.
I finally found a natural counterbalance for all that dogged seeking. It didn’t matter if I was shopping in Scotland or sipping coffee in Savannah, the highlight of every trip was always the same, and somehow perfectly unique each time. Perhaps driven by a subconscious urge to recharge, I learned to ground myself with microdoses of actual human connection.
So while life progressed in beautiful ways, sometimes working on that book felt like wasting time. I struggled with stepping into the past and spending late nights regurgitating old timelines that almost don’t feel real anymore.
For three years I avoided stagnation by piling on more chaos, traveling, burning through my savings, ending up back at my parents’ house to let my bank account refill. Yesterday, I sent 50,000 carefully culled and crafted words to an editor with the intention of turning them into a book. Those two things could not have coexisted…
Deep within you there is a tiny space that contains the infinite universe. Most people won’t tell you this because if you knew, you’d stop going to work and instead spend your whole day roller blading or skeet-shooting or whatever it is that makes that space light up like a disco.
But if I wanted to know her, it would mean building a mosaic out of the smashed pieces of our collective memories.
There is no wrong way to panic. The world is not black and white, all of us can be right. The fear expression is simply coming from where we fear loss the most, and getting in touch with that reconnects us to ourselves and, if we let it, humanity.
Birds chirped high in the trees, more scattered from her feeders as she shut the door behind her. The feeders were getting low. She needed to buy birdseed, but was it worth the risk? Was there actually any risk? Whatever. It’s annoying out there, she thought, picturing that crying baby’s wet and anguished face. The world couldn’t stay gross forever. The birds could wait.