She looked away from the monitor to hang up on the incoming call. After setting her phone on silent, she lost herself with faceless friends.
***
This post was written in response to the Red Writing Hood weekly writing meme on Write On Edge. This week, writers were asked to write a short story using Twitter as our Muse and 140 characters as our character limit.
I used to fill journals faster than I could buy them. “Dear Diary” was too trite for me, so I just wrote for myself and ended each entry with a heart.
There are at least 10 journals I have that take me from middle school through college and had I kept at it, there would likely be five times that by now.
But I got married. Got a full time job. Had a baby. Moved cross country. Through it all I managed to update a journal entry here and there. Instead of a daily journey through yesterday, I was able to capture moments in Polaroids built with my words.
Then something strange happened. I started blogging. The private thoughts jumbled in my head were no longer being saved for my pages. Instead, I was sharing them with anyone who cared to stop by for a peek inside my head. And all was well, until The Husband handed me this…
He saw me drooling over it at the Arizona Renaissance Festival and it came home with me. It’s lovely. Hand-tooled. Real leather. And if I care to take the journal back with me next year, the artisan will cut out my bound pages and fill the cover with empty lines for me to fill again. The writer in me was thrilled. And then I got performance anxiety.
This wasn’t just any old journal I picked up from the local pharmacy. It was special and deserved more than This is What Happened to Me Today. I could share that here, with you. And if I felt the need, I could delve even deeper into my head in the cheap journal I found with my own words that has taken me more than 3 years to fill. No, this one deserved something special.
So it sat on my desk, unopened and untouched waiting for me to decide when the time was write and its purpose.
I didn’t think about it every day. There’s the writing and the dreams of a book deal and the agent seeking and the raising a kid who is probably already smarter than I ever will be and the working out and the writing for Owning Pink and the new role as an official Erma and the Bookieboo writing and the remembering to breathe thing.
Writing…writing…writing….
I’ve never really allowed myself the chance to be anything else. At eight years of age, I decided my destiny and have breathed that single thought ever since. I even went into newspaper reporting as my day job with the intention of writing for myself each night. That didn’t work out so well. Others may thrive with that plan. I came home so burnt out I didn’t want to write a shopping list. Maybe that’s why I didn’t fight it much when The Husband asked if I wanted to stay home to raise Buttercup after she was born.
Even with Motherhood redefining my reality, I’ve always been searching for a bigger piece of myself not yet defined by anyone. In short, I needed a hobby. Not blogging. Not journaling. Not anything related to the words that I am not paid for but for which the simple act of sharing keeps me whole inside. I needed something outside of that and stumbled upon it, and the eventual purpose of the new leather journal, quite by accident when I decided to start mixing my own natural beauty products for myself. Eventually I made some for my friends. And then I decided to add even more to my to do list by opening an etsy shop.
The Husband only asked me if I was crazy once. And that was before he realized that even if no one buys a thing, mixing things up in the kitchen is just an extension of my newfound yoga practice. It’s another way to relax and something I truly enjoy. So he shut up, smart man that he is.
My journal now serves as a record keeper for my personal recipes. Words might still fill the page, but in a very new way. And this makes me smile.
Today I declare my independence from:
*The laundry: It’s America’s birthday. Me sorting whites would just be plain rude, don’t ya think?
*My scale: I used to weigh myself every day. And when I finally conquered my eating disorder, I had reduced the need for scale validation to once a week. Today is my day. And I’m taking it off.
*Self-doubt: What if? Can I? Am I good enough? Will I ever? Who needs that playing on a loop inside their head?
*Dusting: How else can I teach my kid the joys of writing in the inch-thick layer of desert sand that always seems to reappear five minutes after I clean?
*Eating my feelings: Writing them is a little easier on the waistline.
*My Etsy shopping addiction: I think I need a 12-step program. Unless the powers that be have added an Etsy subhead to the Compulsive Shopper label and forgot to tell me.
*Self-criticism: Today will be a good hair, no make-up, I Feel Good in this Outfit Day no matter what the mirror says.
*Time: I’m always running out of it. Today, I’m not paying attention to it.
Reality: Buttercup lives in a world of princesses and fairies and magic and pretend and it’s usually her daddy who plays along. Today I suspend thinking like a non-fiction writer and embrace my daughter’s imagination.
Excuses: If I have time to sit on my ass and write a blog post or an essay or a query letter than I sure as hell have time to dedicate 30 minutes to a yoga session or some Zumba.
Which reminds me…Happy Birthday, America. If you’ll excuse me, I have some important things to attend to.
What have you declared your independence from?
The sun wakes me up.
Even with the damned light-blocking curtains in our room, the bits of light peeking through the sides are enough to break into my happy little dreams. I curse myself for forgetting to put on my sleep mask the night before and decide to throw the quilt over my head for a little more time to rest. I’m allowed. My mom is visiting and I know that the minute she leaves, my chances for anything that resembles sleeping in will be out the closest window.
But first I think I’ll check my email. You know, in case an agent has decided overnight that my book is Super Crazy Awesome and has sent a message asking me to call them as soon as I wake up because they are considerate enough to realize Arizona is three hours behind New York? So I reach for the phone on my nightstand and with a precision only a social media addict can attempt, have my email loading before I even open my eyes to focus on what I am looking at.
Blah, blah, new twitter followers, blah, blah, blah, I am now rich because of a dead relative I have never heard of in Zimbabwe and can I please forward all of the necessary banking information to the kind lawyer handling the matter, blah, blah, my mother-in-law wants to be friends on Facebook, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and WHAT IN THE HELL?
The fuzziness from sleep is instantly replaced by an overwhelming sense of HOLY FUCK WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO NOW and I resist the urge to reach over to the other side of the bed and backhand the still sleeping Husband because my cover being blown is like, totally his fault. Or maybe it’s mine for actually saying yes when he asked if he could like my blog Facebook page. BFF Mel totally warned me that was a bad idea.
“They’re gonna find you,” she had said.
Who pays attention to that crap?
My mother-in-law, apparently.
Before anyone new here gets too confused, I have a strict Public Blog Policy. In short it goes like this: You are allowed to read if you don’t already know me. That might seem ass-backwards to normal people but when you stop to think about it or stop taking your medication it makes total sense. For starters? My in-laws say things like, “Dangnabbit” and “Dadgum” instead of, you know, real swear words. I usually behave when in their presence or on the phone with either one of them, but here?
Have y’all read my shit?
And once the in-laws get on my little social media bandwagon, all hell (sorry, I mean heck…oh shit, it’s happening already) will break loose because then my side of the very Mexican and You Can’t Say Things Like Fuck family will find out and I’ll start censoring what I write and then things will get all boring for me and for you and I’ll replace posts like this with posts not like this. Obviously, this is a major problem.
Besides, if I approve the request, there’ll be questions about my book and people will assume I like to Share My Feelings with them on a regular basis and I’ll most likely piss everyone off, alienate myself from The Family, and The Husband will just sit there looking confused when I try to explain to him Just One More Time the logistics behind not letting anyone know about my writing until I get an agent, a book deal, and make the best seller lists (maybe even all in the same week, right?) because then I will be established and I would totally be okay with that.
But until then this was all supposed to be my secret word garden. Password: Strangers Only.
Before I start to unnecessarily hyper-ventilate, I blink a few times and focus on the phone screen again. Her name is still there. Shitshitshitshitshit!
“What are you doing?” The Husband is now awake and staring at his crazy wife checking her email on her phone before she has even gotten out of bed to brush her teeth and pee. “You realize that if technology as we know it were to disappear tomorrow, you would probably go clinically insane from the withdrawals within a matter of moments, right?”
I don’t answer. I don’t trust myself to speak. Instead, I hand him the phone and climb out of bed to take care of the morning bathroom routine. As I reach for my toothbrush, I hear him start to laugh. It’s probably a good thing he is still in bed because I am pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to stand at this point.
I am proven wrong just a moment later.
“Quick, turn around and give me your best Deer Caught in Headlights” look.” The Husband is standing behind me with the phone, ready to snap a picture.
I turn around, my expression unchanged from the moment I first saw the email.
“Perfect.”
This would be the third item in the Trifecta of Happiness. But that didn’t look nearly as impressive as BlogHer Syndicated Something I Said! So I went with that instead.
This blog replaced my diary years ago.
It’s where I do my writing for me everyday. Knowing that my words are for me first. The three people who read my blog second.
No pressure. Except for when I get bored and obsessively check my stats and realize I passed the three reader mark a while ago and freak myself out of blogging because OMG… PEOPLE SEE THIS THING?
Or like today. You know. When your wildest bloggy dreams come true and BlogHer says they’ll syndicate one of your posts?
Yeah, dude. Major performance anxiety.
If you are a regular reader here, please stop by say hello over there. If you came from there and landed here? Please don’t be alarmed if I start talking to myself or when The Husband decides to interview me or if I start calling for my finger monkey named Platform. Oh, and that murder rap is all talk. All talk, I tell you! I mean really, have you ever heard of a murderer who writes fairy tales?
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