Laugh? Cry? Bit of Both? Bit of Both.

You know when you’ve had the absolutely most shittastic week (or day, or month, year…) and someone sends you something that makes you cry because it was exactly what you needed to hear but you didn’t know you needed to hear it? Yeah? Well, that was me when I got a text from my sister after she proofread a recent blog post for me.

You see, before the pandemic I spent most of my free time knitting. It wasn’t a ton of time because I had very little downtime between working at an independent school during the day and teaching at a karate dojo at night. But I still made time to knit while watching TV with the Hubster and spawns in the evenings and on the weekends. When Covid hit the US, most of the TV time was taken up by endless hours of news coverage and it was doing a bang up job of ramping up my anxiety and lowering my threshold for coping with catastrophe. Reducing my time watching TV lead to less time knitting. I found I needed the escape reading provided, but I wasn’t into reading what I used to (sci-fi, horror, etc.) because to be honest it was too close to what was really happening in the world and I couldn’t handle it. I wasn’t looking for realism of any type either, because in late March of 2020 reality sucked! Apparently I was looking for shape shifting aliens, and dystopian cyborgs, and eventually rich Irish Billionaires, covert military operatives, and small town family owned wineries. I wanted a happy ending every time. Not because I think that’s how real life works, but because I wanted to believe that sometimes it could.

Over 18 months into the pandemic that closed the on-site school classes and reduced my dojo hours, I’m back to knitting, but not nearly as much as I did pre-Covidtimes. In fact, I’m pretty certain my percentage of free time spent knitting vs reading has flip-flopped in the last 18 months. And in the midst of things trying to return to “normal” I started writing. Because I needed to find an outlet for the brain squirrels all the reading was creating. And it wasn’t just the reading encouraging the writing. It was the need to get out of my own head. To move past my own thoughts and find a way to verbalize the emotions I was experiencing. I tried to write a novel. Again. I’ve tried to write a novel multiple times in the past, and it’s never ended with anything more than a few scattered pages of scattered ideas, with zero direction and even less passion. I’m much more of a short attention span theater writer, so I started blogging. But I also have a tendency to ramble, leading to longer blog posts than I feel are readable by a short attention span theater audience. And my writing needs editing and proofing. Because I miss spelling mistakes, and extra spaces, and all the grammery things I should find as a degreed English teacher and editor. But after looking at the same words over and over my eyes and brain tend to overlook the goofs and oops. Pssst… if you find any in this blog, let me know. My regular editor didn’t get to read this one. I had another bookish friend read it, but then I changed it around again, soooo…..

Anyway, when I recognized I needed someone to help me proof and edit my writing, I called on someone I could trust to be really honest with me. Who would read my words and tell me when I was being too analytical. Too wordy. Too everything: My sister. She gets me. And she gets that. And the fact that she has a solid background in writing as well definitely helps. She’s not an English teacher. She is a teacher, though. And a bridal boutique owner. An attorney. A mom. A museum docent. And an avid reader. And she gets me. She knows I’m writing for me, but also for others who get me. So when she texted me that the blog I had just sent her to proofread for me was “PERFECT!” I cried. I cried because even though she has chaos in her life (first week back to school, remnants of hurricane Ida creating a creek in her basement, …), she read my words and they made her “feel really good.” I cried because she said exactly what I needed to hear without knowing I needed to hear it. I hadn’t filled her in on the craptastrophy happening here over the past week. She wasn’t just saying it to make me feel better. And that felt really really good. And I’m an equal opportunity emotional crier. So, cue the waterworks.

And in the midst of writing this, my younger spawn brought me a pin she bought for me while she was on vacation with her bestie and zher family. And it’s so appropriate and inappropriate that I laughed so hard I nearly peed myself. No joke. And then I cried again. So maybe life is never going to be romance book perfect. But it will definitely have its moments. And they’ll come out of the blue and hit me with their significance and beauty and love. And I’ll probably cry. Again.