Getting Back to Basics

I briefly considered writing this post for my other blog (you know, the one that actually is supposed to contain musings about my life), but I put that one on hiatus more than a year ago, and I feel bad to take it off hiatus for what could potentially be only one post.

So here we are.

I've been really quiet. Mostly I just needed a break. The events of the past two weeks just really brought me to a brink I didn't like being on. A kind of mute terror that nothing would ever be okay again.

And no, I'm not being dramatic.

One day, I might actually write about this time here, but if you'd like to know exactly what's going on, I have a post about it on my Patreon feed, which you can get to (as well as some awesome rewards) for a $1 subscription pledge. Eek. That looks like a plug. It's really not. I don't like keeping secrets from you guys, but what's going on right now is so ugly that I can't just post it out in public. Patreon is a balance of both, offering easy access to those who really want to know while keeping it relatively private so it can't just come up whenever someone searches my name.

For those of you who'd rather like to skip to the current point I'm making: The shit situation continues, but I'm picking myself up (again) and dusting myself off (again) and getting on with getting on (again.)

Sometimes, it's really hard, almost impossible to do that. Especially when I've been knocked down and back so many times that I'm about a hair's breadth away from losing all faith in humanity. Because the most frustrating thing about all this is that I didn't put myself here. 

But I have to get out somehow and I can't do that if I keep wallowing in the rage I feel toward the growing list of people who've wronged me and those I love. I can't get out if I don't have hope that one day, something I or someone in my family did will pan out. I also can't do it if I'm snowing myself under with a laundry list of expectations when some days, just the act of getting up for the day feels like a chore.

So now I'm going back to basics. If I feel like I'm too burned out to write, I don't write. I've scrapped my publishing deadline for Book 3 because it's already too close and I really don't need the extra pressure. I'm putting in more time with my freelance work which, while still not quite in the "it's taken off" category, still is doing well enough to give me hope that it will take off in the near future. I'm cutting out as much negativity as I can.

This means willing myself not to dwell on the past, and particularly not this most recent thing. I let myself feel them, but then I remind myself I have to move on and do that instead. But also, I've found that the Trump election has turned a lot of people in my social networks (on all sides of the political divide) into toxic people to have contact with.

So I'm culling them out of my feed.

It's nothing personal, but for the sake of my own well-being, I'm doing what I must in order to keep myself in as good an emotional shape as I can.

Because I can still move for as long as I can function on some level.

And if being ruthless with my culling and stingy with my time is what it takes to just get anything done, so be it.

It's already helped too. Because here I am, writing when on IWSG day I could barely even type out a sentence without crying.

There is hope. There is progress.

Onward.

How about you? How do you deal when life gets really difficult?