I have been mulling this post kinda sorta for a while now. I logged on to write it, marveling that I even remember my password. Then I re-read my intentions post and almost lost my nerve. There’s a lot left undone. But I’m in a phase where I’ll need a lot of nerve, so I might as well begin here.
1) Stay the course from 2012. That capacious intention included writing a book. Well, I wrote it. Yes, yes, yes I did. I did. I wrote my book. It exists. If I told you the title, you could buy it on Amazon. Just yesterday, I threw out all the marked up page proofs on my desk because I don’t need them anymore because there is a real book out in the world with my name on it. That’s really important.
It’s been hard to celebrate writing the book, so hard in fact that I find myself wanting to move on to the next item on the list. My co-author (and boss) is not one to celebrate anything, and writing quickly gave way to relentless promotion and anxiety about sale and how well the book is or isn’t doing. But more than that, a few days after the book came out, Daniel’s mother died. That is such a strange sentence to write, and it is very strange pair of experiences to live. I went to work on a Wednesday, with my “I am a serious author suit” in hand, and prepared to do a big release event that evening. I didn’t return to work until 12 days later. The morning after the event, we got the call that Daniel had feared for years. So we were in the netherland of sitting shiva, then reluctantly (for Daniel) re-entering the world, or rather entering a new world in which he has no mother and no father. And then there was what the writer Claire Messud called “the admin of death” — some preliminary clearing out of the house to prepare it for sale.
And now there seems to be no space for celebration or relief, even. All that passed while I was in another place, in mourning time. And that’s okay, and I can’t change it, but it makes the book seem not quite real, or the accomplishment seem not quite real. It happened but then the fact of it happening became cosmically unimportant. So I came back to work and my colleagues seem to have moved on, and my co-author is like a radio that’s mostly on another frequency, with only intermittent and very brief moments of clarity.
And I think that’s all I have to say for now, partly because doing the book, and all that has been related to it has been such a huge undertaking that it has left me little space to advance in other areas. So fiscal prudence has been, um, not at the forefront let’s just say. In fact, I’ve been deeply and ridiculously overindulgent, and justified it all in the name of needing to look really great at book events. So I’ll start now on that. The negotiation course has also gone by the wayside, too, although I am being very aggressive about getting the salary increased I was promised, which seems to be threatened by a clerical error. And now that I’ve gotten onto Pinterest, my computer screen is crazily magnetic.
But you know what? I wrote my book. And all that other stuff can fall into line or not now. I know how to save and be frugal (even if I’m not acting like it); I know how to do an online course; I know how to walk away from the screen and I ‘ve done all that before. What matters most to me, and where I put most of my energy is into doing what I never ever did, what I always wanted to do, and what I didn’t really know I would do on January 1 of this year, and that is write my book.
Another Door 