Lost and found

Is the other shoe going to drop? This has been the most unexpected year of my life.

First, what a strange year, with the damn pandemic, dragging on and on. I have somewhat memorialized it here. It was a terrifying ride. In some ways, both a lost and a found year. 

Unable to see anyone but my husband, my mother in law and my mom, we stayed at home. We stopped traveling. I worked from home. On the weekends, I worked on my writing and kept up with my one MFA class. 

While I worked harder and longer at work than ever, in my personal life, I stopped running myself ragged. In some ways, it was a much needed respite from it all. 

With the pandemic, also began my new writing journey. 

About a a year and four months ago, I finally wrote honestly about my job, without using figurative language. I started to tell my true tales of being a deputy public defender on the front lines of covid. 

That decision, to merge my writing and law, and to exist at the intersection of my criminal defense practice and my writing practice, started a chain of events. I spoke up at the rally for George Floyd. Poetry poured out of me. I'd always been insecure about my poetry, and had called myself a prose writer, never a poet. 

More opportunities came fourth. A podcast. Then, I wrote a law and literature hybrid genre chapbook (which will actually be my first "published" book this August) and finally, yes finally (drop the F Bomb and not a mic) finished the YA memoir which will come out later this year, right after my fiftieth birthday.

And so here I am. In uncomfortable territory. In pants that are way too tight. Trying to get it and keep it all together. Moderating many things, or trying. Promise and trust, I'm really trying.

It's hard not to be terrified. The last months have been magical in some ways, but I can feel another big change on the horizon. 

Change is scary. So so scary. It's hard to not want to numb myself so that my anxiety doesn't take over. But I have to stay lucid. Present. Here. In the now. 

A little voice in my head tells me, this is what you always wanted, what you've worked so hard for, don't F it up. So I'll try not to.