Life is a Mess But There’s Hope

Typically I go on Twitter to word vomit, but this word vomit felt way too long for Twitter, and threads, despite their length, tend to get ignored because TL;DR. I get it, but if you’re here, you’ve [hopefully] committed to sitting through a life update or sorts.

First off, this year has been a fucking mess and a half. I don’t use the f word often, but it belongs there. If you haven’t been on my social media as much, besides Covid, my classes being ten kinds of messed up due to covid and university mishandling, several pets (2 cats and my mom’s dog) passed since 2020, and my dad had a severe Covid infection early in the pandemic, managed to get off a ventilator, recover, and go back to work after months of rehabilitation before suddenly passing away in May. I’ve been on a mental health roller coaster I never asked to be on, and it made OCD symptoms I was uncertain I had VERY OBVIOUS over the past few months.

I developed health checking anxiety/OCD with my dad and once he passed, my brain decided the only sensible thing to do was to pass it to my dogs. I’m working on it, but that truly isn’t the point of this post. I just feel like I need to do a lot of scene setting since I haven’t posted a whole lot as of late on my website and this is why.

What I’ve learned about myself recently is that I need structure, badly. I am the kind of person who does well with lists, schedules, time blocked out and planned in advance, which is why I was so good in college and graduate school. I was strict with my time and reaped the benefits. What happened to disrupt this was a sort of mental health free fall in 2018 and that I had started to come out of right before the pandemic, which then plummeted right back to where it was and worse after that. I never was able to regain the structure I previously had, and over the course of 2+ years, I sort of forgot I ever had that structure and with that laxity came mess.

Messy mental states, messy emotional states, messy writing/publication, messy everything.

And I don’t like mess. What I’m trying to do at this point is go back to a fairly regimented life again. I took the time I needed to cool down and get my brain straightened out, but I think to feel the best I can, it would be doing myself a kindness by rebuilding that structure.

I’d also like to use this post as a little bit of accountability for myself later. At the end of the week, I’m starting a course on planning/time management/structure for writers. As an indie author, the lack of structure and self-made deadlines leads to laxity on my part. My hope is that this will help me recenter and find direction again. I’m someone who uses a bullet journal anyway, but extra structure and new techniques never hurt.

Some other goals include:

FIXING MY WEBSITE. So I broke my website. You may have noticed that it looks far fuglier than it used to. I messed around with the theme without realizing the theme I previously used was “retired,” so now it looks hideous by comparison. Luckily, my partner can code and promised to fix up my website fairly soon, so yay. Stay tuned for a custom website that doesn’t look like this sad basic-ness.

PUBLISH 2 BOOKS IN 2022. I have two projects open at the moment: Trousers and Trouble (book 2 of the Paranormal Society Romances featuring trans leads) and The Reanimator’s Heart (which is book 1 of an off-shoot series based out of the paranormal society but it’s more of a mystery-romance than just a romance). I’m very excited about both projects, so my hope is that getting my shit together soon will lead to me finishing them fairly quickly (or quickly for me). My last two books have been a semi hot mess in regards to releases, and I REALLY want to do this properly this time.

GET BETTER AT MARKETING. I suffer from “I don’t want to bother them” syndrome, which is totally anxiety driven and in turn leads to my book releases being meh at best. Trying to rebuild my self-confidence and work on actual ways to market my books instead of flinging spaghetti is the goal here. I’ve already done some note taking and video watching, so I’m hopeful.

WRITE MORE CONSISTENTLY. There’s a vicious cycle with my mental health and writing. No writing = bad mental health = no writing = bad mental health = lather rinse repeat. Then the writing muscle withers and I have to rebuild all that. Hence my current need for structure. The hope is that structure will allow more writing and more writing will help to smooth over those spike bits of anxiety I’m still dealing with.

As mentioned earlier, the hope is that the course I’m taking along with my current drive to get my shit together will actually work and propel me into doing more and getting closer to my goals faster. I am really, really sick of spinning my wheels as I have for the past few months. On one hand, it’s perfectly understandable given what happened; I get that. At the same time, I hate how it feels. I hate feeling like I’m constantly failing or falling, even if I’m not. This certainly isn’t a new year, new me, rah rah type post, but I do want to remind myself that it is possible to get my shit together. It also helps to have a post like this to remind myself what I intend to do.

We’ll see. Either way, hopefully you all will hear from me more often, whether you want to or not, lol.

Stay safe, peeps.

Kara