Life Update 2 // Upheaval and No Internet

I never got around to finishing my series of life updates before November rolled around, so this blog is going to maintain its status as update central for the next few posts, I think. Let’s take a quick break from writing to talk about life. (What am I saying? Writing is life.)

I guess the first thing I want to cover doesn’t come first chronologically, but it’s the easiest to talk about, and so I’ll lead with it. I moved. Not far—I’m still in Virginia. This has been my third move, and my third town, in as many years. Our original deal with our landlords was that we could rent their basement until their daughter decided to return home to live with them. Long story short, that’s what ended up happening, and they were able to give us sixty days to find a new apartment and move out. For some of you, sixty days may feel like a wealth of time, and we managed, but we were also supposed to be traveling for roughly two weeks of that, which made it more interesting.

We’ve been all moved into our new apartment for three months now. The downside to our new place is that we don’t have internet. My understanding is that our landlords have tried to get internet, but providers aren’t willing to come out and give service to this area. VA encounters issues like this, despite how wealthy this county is. Actually, in some ways, because of it, since when you’re rich you think you can afford to demand that there be no ugly eyesores like cell towers and at the same time ask yourself why you never have more than one bar of reception. So yeah, no internet, and while my sister and I have unlimited data on our phones, there are only a few spots in the apartment where we can access the LTE network. Eventually we will look into a booster, but that hasn’t been our priority.

The silver lining to this whole situation is that, while it’s not especially convenient to not have internet, and I’m not being rewarded a million dollars for my suffering as certain memes have hinted, my productivity has skyrocketed. I no longer have the option of sitting around on YouTube, unless I wanted to stand outside and enjoy the brisk, below freezing breeze. This has turned writing into a generally more appealing option.

We live in an expensive county, and while we were blessed with low rent two apartments in a row, our new place is significantly more expensive, so I’ve been picking up more hours at work. (We also pet sit for our landlords on the regular, which lowers the rent. Their dogs are adorable, too, so that’s a perk.)

This all leads me to my next update, which is a long time in coming, but for months I wasn’t ready to share, and I couldn’t give you all the details, even if I’d wanted to. I got a new job ten months ago. I work at a pie shop now, and I love it. Sure, I have to deal with rude, angry, thoughtless, indecisive, clueless people all day, intermingled with the regulars I’ve come to love. But I love my boss, my coworkers, the location. (It’s smack dab in the middle of town, houses squeezed together and businesses clustered like close friends, but there’s a field WITH COWS IN IT, like, RIGHT BESIDE THE ROAD. Businesses, houses, COWS, more buildings. *shakes head*) The work is physical and challenging, but even though I’m on my feet all day, lugging around heavy trays of pie, I don’t go home every night feeling like I have to crawl into bed. I don’t spend my days off trying not to have an anxiety attack at the creeping thought that it’s a matter of time before I will have to go back to work. Probably I will talk someday about what it’s like as an eating disorder survivor working at a pie shop, but today is not that day.

I needed to take another step in my personal growth, and getting a new job was that step. Phrasing it that way feels a little dishonest to me, because it implies that there was an abundance of agency on my part, and in retrospect I did make a life-changing decision and act of my own accord for my own good, but at the time I felt like I got backed into a corner. I was extremely unhappy in my old job. It had been getting worse, and I had been buying into the lie that another job, especially in a secular environment, would be just as bad. Things reached a breaking point when I finally decided to speak up about something that had been happening to me. The whole situation was really dark (to the point where I drove around, for several days, with a teddy bear in my passenger seat as moral support), but the bright spots were equally bright. Prime example: the day after I quit my job, where they were kind enough to let me leave without an official two weeks’ notice, and where they also gave me thirty days paid leave, I had my job interview at the shop, and I was able to start work the next week. I could have started sooner, if I had wanted to, but I needed time to collect myself.

Now I work more hours than I used to, at higher pay, and while I’m not rolling in wealth, I have a better shot at independence than I did before. Mostly I’m just happy to have more money for Starbucks.

I’ve had to gloss over a lot of details in this update, and I will have to skip a lot more before it’s done, because there are people I don’t want to hurt, and there are people who will be angry at me if I talk about what they did, are already angry at me for telling the truth in other venues. But if I’m going to tell you everything that’s been happening in my life, I am not going to skip over the most glaring section. You have the right to know, and I have the right to talk about it.

The bare bones is this, and maybe I’m saying too much, but I want to say something. I left my job because it turned toxic, and while that specific issue was resolved beautifully, and the person I had to forgive is a better friend than before, another issue popped up after that. And another. Because it wasn’t the job that was toxic, it was the people and the environment they created. These people were my friends; this was my church. I came to them for help when someone was leaving me afraid for my safety and well-being, and they punished me for it. They punished my sister for standing up for me and trying to clarify details that had been lost in the mix. They betrayed us in ways we should have expected and braced for, but didn’t because we thought too highly of them. I worked for almost three years to achieve a level of vulnerability and trust with my church friends that I now regret. I think it would take an actual miracle for me to go back to attending that church, and there are certain people that I never want to see again.

Someday, I think I want to talk about how Christians fail, because not enough people are having this discussion, or allowing it, and it benefits no one when we hide our ugly. Now I understand why people leave their churches, leave the community, leave the faith. This is not a hurt that is easily described or overcome. So if you are the praying type, I would appreciate your prayers. This happened five months ago, but I’m still living in the aftermath, and I’m going to be honest with you, I am having a very hard time forgiving these people. I have spoken to my therapist numerous times about how to do this, and I am trying.

I realize this update got dark pretty fast, and I apologize if it was too depressing for you. I appreciate you sticking with me. If you’re worried about me, please don’t be. I have my writing, and I have my job. I have a new house, and I have a few friends still left to my name. I will be okay. But I wanted to be honest with you about what’s been happening, and this is where I’m at.


What about you, coffee beans? What are some hard times you’ve been experiencing lately?

Life Update #1 // November is Coming

How? How is it almost NaNoWriMo already? Of course, NaNoWriMo is awesome, and I can’t wait. But how so soon? TELL ME. I’m still having trouble realizing it’s only a few days away. I’m not prepared.

*takes deep breath* I am calm.

It occurs to me that I never updated you on my last NaNoWriMo and how it went. I mean that not in an “it just occurred to me” way, but more of a “this occurs to me on a regular basis and I have already drafted multiple posts as a result and then failed to publish them” way. Since work on my current main project is reaching a period of semi-burnout, which I would like to keep as brief as possible, I figure it’s time to take a break and tend to my sorely-neglected blog. There are so many posts and updates I want to finish and share with you. My Out of Coffee, Out of Mind drafts folder is starting to feel like a diary of sad dead ends.

Before we discuss this coming NaNoWriMo, let’s deal with the previous one, since that’s what’s been bugging me the most. Last I spoke with you on the subject, I had plans to write a ton of words, albeit not as many as I have in NaNoWriMos past. In case you didn’t notice, I didn’t succeed. Or rather, I hit 50,000 words, so in all respects, I did win NaNoWriMo. *throws confetti* I don’t mean that in a disparaging way. I am not trying to be down on myself for the number of words I wrote. There is nothing wrong with 50K, and those who write only 50K are still winners in every respect. But for me, it was a sad achievement because I have done better in the past. I was used to overachieving, I enjoyed it, and I had looked forward to doing it again.

Last November was hard. It was sandwiched between difficult months. On one end, I was struggling with the leftover brain fog from my last bout with an eating disorder, and on the other hand, I was fighting another relapse. Almost as soon as November began, I realized that I was too close to a complete mental burnout to try anything more than the minimum needed to win. In comparison with what I have done before, it felt like I barely participated. When I saw all my fellow overachievers from years past going pedal to the metal, I’ll admit, I did cry a little. I had been part of something that meant a great deal to me, and I had lost that, even if it was only temporary. There was this huge gap between what I wanted to create and what I was able to create. The muse just wasn’t there; my vocabulary felt stunted, my attention span limited. It was like a bruise that I didn’t want to poke. So that month, taking care of myself meant taking a step back and only writing what I needed to keep up my winner’s streak.

That’s not to say I didn’t love what I was writing. Over the course of the month, I fleshed out several ideas, drafted a bunch of blog posts, wrote some poetry, and ultimately, did whatever I could to get the creative juices flowing. I didn’t finish a novel, or even come close. That would have been asking too much of my brain, especially given the story ideas I had chosen. My biggest triumph that month, aside from choosing to take care of myself, was drafting the beginnings of a story that, while emotionally difficult to write, felt more rewarding and more promising than anything I had worked on in a while. Funny thing is, it came to me while I was watching a video on poisonous mushrooms, and it came all at once, in a deafening rush. Even though I have yet to tack down the nitty gritty details, I have all the bones of the thing—I found its skeleton, hidden in the back of my mind, complete and tangible. Actually writing it was surprisingly difficult, given the existing framework, like moving sand with tweezers, but it was difficult in a “I am trying to paint what I am seeing and I am trying to paint it well” way, and less of a “I don’t know what to paint” way. I picked it up yesterday, fleshed out more ideas, got excited and bought a writing journal for it. Every time I touch it, I get an electrical shock.

As for what I’ll be doing this November, I’m not sure. Naturally, I know that I’ll try for at least 50,000 words. Over the course of the last month or so, I have developed a routine where I try to read for an hour each day at a coffee shop. During November, and the days leading up to it, I plan to turn that reading time into additional writing time. Since I’m working forty hours a week now, I don’t know if I will have as much time to overachieve as I have had in the past, and I don’t know if it would be healthy for me to try just yet. This has been a hard year. So I don’t know if I’m going to attempt more than 100,000 words.

With regards to what I’m going to write, I don’t know. I have several options. I might cheat this NaNoWriMo and edit an existing project instead of drafting a new one—I have several novels I’m trying to polish, and I’m not excited about setting them aside completely for a whole month, although it might be good for me to take a vacation from them. I could also pull out my trunked novel and, for nostalgia’s sake, give it a complete revamp. Last November’s promising story is still begging to be finished, so that’s a possibility. There’s another novel I really want to work on as well, one that’s begging for a complete fresh start, beginning with a new rough draft. Those are my options, I think. I have so many balls in the air already, I don’t want to add any more just yet.

But I doubt I will know for sure until November first.