It's time
Books and babies will not wait
Dear Writer,
Wow, it’s been a little while, huh? How’s it going? Has your work been good? It’s okay if you haven’t touched anything at all… I get it. But if you have, yay!
Me… I’ve been making videos.
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I know, I know. It’s not writing exactly, but baby… I gotta sell this book. I spent 20 years building up that expertise, now I need it to fund me so that I can pay for the therapist that drives away the demons that live in the books that Lani writes.
Ah… yes. I started therapy again and let me tell you something… damn.
I have only stuck with therapy long term because the trauma was so bad. Then I got better and stuck with it because the habit was set, but when my therapist moved out of state in January and couldn’t treat me anymore, I thought, “Hey, I’m doing pretty good. It’s just a few months until I get to Colorado. I’ll be okay.”
And I mean… I was.
Until I started writing again.
Until the nightmares.
Yeah… I already told you about that. ANYWAY. I started therapy two weeks ago and it’s unbelievably stupid how helpful it is. But part of getting back into it means working through the backlog of shit I’ve been suppressing while I do other shit.
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On the bright side, I’m feeling my feelings again. You know how Brené Brown says you can’t selectively numb? She’s right. I numbed all of it, and muted the unpleasant stuff, but also the joy.
Now, I have my joy back, and I’m not going to lie… it’s a lot. If you’ve never muted your feelings before… first of all, good for you… then you may not have had the experience of them coming back but when they do, they are not fucking around. My joy is here and it is intense. I was driving in the car and a song played and it made me think of Ian and how much I love him and I just started crying in the car.
I just gave my kid $50 so they could buy spices and start cooking for themselves in their new apartment and it was the most intense joy I’ve ever felt while giving away money.
But also on the intensity train are my irritability, my anger, my anxiety… yikes. I know it’ll pass. This is not my first rodeo with this shit.
Still. Feels weird. Looking forward to normalizing the feels again.
And honestly, none of it is too bad. Not like it was. I’m just not used to feeling All The things so it all feels like A Lot when it’s really only a little.
Anyway… because I’m too much of a fraidy cat to go back into the book, I’ve been working on marketing. TikTok videos, planning the launch of the Lani Diane Rich YouTube channel, doing podcasts, planning collaborations…
… and there is The Book, sitting at the back of my brain, stretching out, going nowhere. “You do you, honey,” she says. “I’ll be here waiting when you get back.”
I’m like Pam from The Office when she’s in labor but refuses to go to the hospital to have the baby. She says it’s because of her marketing work her shitty insurance, but it’s really just that she’s afraid of the birthing process.
I might be identifying with that just a little.
But the thing is, I can feel the book working in the back of my head. You know how that is; you’re not actively writing, but it’s still just there? I’m absently building my soundtrack for it. My mind drifts out of conversations I’m having with real people in front of me so I can build the conversations between the fictional characters in my head. When I’m doing anything that doesn’t require my full attention, I’m playing the ending in my head.
OMG, Writer. The ending. I already know exactly what I’m going to do, and I cry just thinking about it.
I know it’s time.
It’s time.
This week. I promise. The next time you hear from me, I will have gone back into that book and written something.
How’s it all going for you?
Everything,
L