Oh! Hey there! Yeah, soooo….about life. It can be hard sometimes. The last [checks notes] four months have been hard in the stupidest possible way. Like, nothing was happening to make life difficult. I was thriving in my day job and I’ve pretty much settled into a decent routine of visiting my dad in assisted living and keeping the dog happy with trips to the dog park and doggy daycare, but my brain has legit been like [INSERT HORROR MOVIE MUSIC] for months on end. Depression is super fuckin’ fantastic like that. I mean, the call was definitely coming from inside the house, and I kept letting it go to voicemail because who has time for creepy voices and heavy breathing? I had doomscrolling to do, y’all.
Even if I’d been capable of writing, why do it? Why shout yet another thing into the void, especially now that social media is such a fractured landscape? It was hard enough to keep up with Facebook and Twitter, but now there are a billion different platforms and no one can agree on which one to use because they’re all problematic in different ways. But if I ever want to get an agent and book deal, or sell my stories as self-published books, I need a platform. And I had one. I was building a pretty decent Twitter following, even if it was mostly other writers. It made me feel like someday when I had something to announce, there would be people there to see it and maybe share it. I had a plan and some goals—both for my writing and my life—and I was doing the things I needed to do to make them real.
Then shit happened that I had no control over, and now everything is a mess. Maybe things are starting to get back on track. The fog of depression has lifted enough for me to plan a revision for one of my novels, at least, and make this blog post. I’m seven chapters into the revision and still sticking to the plan, so maybe I also learned a few helpful things last year. Fingers crossed I manage to finish it before I die of old age!
So happy belated new year. I hope your 2024 is an improvement over 2023 in whatever way you need it to be.
Esmari Writes 