Sorry, I Haven't Been Myself Lately

On Reacquainting Oneself with One's Self

Yesterday I sat, silent and still, staring at nothing for seven minutes. I was not thinking about anything. I was not contemplating the mysteries of the universe. I was not working through some kind of problem in my head. I was not wondering what to have for dinner. I was not even observing anything. I was just…blank.

I did not do this on purpose, as part of some kind of spiritual practice or as a deliberate attempt to empty my mind or reach some greater level of consciousness. I did it, I suppose, because I had finished the things I needed to accomplish in the first part of the day and I had nothing else I needed to accomplish at the moment and my brain finally didn’t have to keep chugging along, so it shut down.

I don’t know how I feel about this.

When I realized what I had been doing—or rather, that I had been not doing—I felt unsettled. Because although I did a lot of this sort of zoning out as a child, those spacey times were always pleasant and relaxing and not blank. I couldn’t tell you all the things I thought about when I was staring off into space as a child, but I was definitely pondering something.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my childhood, about the kind of person I was and whether some essential parts of that earlier iteration of myself are utterly irretrievable. I suppose that’s natural when a parent dies, when the source of half of your DNA, one of the primary people who made who you are, is no longer around in flesh and blood, can no longer tell you stories or field your questions or laugh at your well-timed joke. You feel like you’re fractured and in danger of dropping a piece of yourself. You feel like he accidentally left you behind and you’re never going to find him again. You feel like you don’t know what to do with your hands.

In his sermon on Sunday, my husband reminded us that the popular notion of disembodied souls floating through heaven for eternity is not a biblical concept, despite widespread acceptance of this by Christians who internalize the culture around them far more than they internalize scriptural truths. Heaven is not our home. We were made from earth, for earth. Our hope is not that we will someday float around in heaven strumming harps like in Looney Toons cartoons. Our hope, expectation, and promise is not just the life everlasting part of the creeds, it’s the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting—on a new earth. That is what you find in Scripture again and again. That’s the Christian hope.

And the only thing I could think of in that moment at church was to thank God that my dad is not a ghost or an angel, he’s not a wandering spirit speaking to people in dreams, and he’s certainly not a cardinal. (Where, where did that utter nonsense come from, people?) That someday I will again be able to feel my dad’s arms, bodily, around me in an embrace. I will be able to sit, bodily, next to him and put my head on his stomach and listen to it gurgle like I did when I was a little girl. That the last time I held his hand is not the last time I will hold his hand.

I guess I needed to cry in that moment at church, but I stuffed the tears back inside, and the meniscus has been threatening to burst ever since. There are whole days I don’t think about my dad being gone. And there are whole days I spend right at the brink, my toes curling over the edge of the precipice of falling apart. Most days fall in between those two extremes.

I’ve had some really good days since my father’s death. I’ve had moments when I’ve laughed really hard and all those good chemicals have flooded my brain. But yesterday I realized that it’s been a while since I had an extended period of fun.

Maybe this is because I missed my regular writing retreat experience the past couple years. Maybe it’s because we haven’t been on a real family vacation in a couple years. Maybe it’s because we’ve been selling a house and buying a house and trying to get all the house projects done. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent nearly a decade of stressing over finishing a book and getting an agent and getting a contract and finishing another book and getting another contract, and scheduling and planning and carrying out interviews and promotions and events, while also trying to hit deadlines for the next book and the next one.

And in the midst of all of that crazybusyness comes sickness and death and grief and trying to hold others up in their grief. There’s been so much going out of me, so little going in.

If you follow me on social media, you might have noticed a precipitous drop-off in selfies since February. Those I have posted are more often than not unsmiling, moody, or, as one follower helpfully put it, “so serious.” (I deleted her comment. What does one say to that?)

I’m not avoiding selfies as part of some project to tamp down pride and work on my humility, though that might be beneficial to my soul. I’m not posting the occasional moody selfie to change my online persona because brooding is in this year. It’s just that every picture I take of me looks “so serious” because it’s reflecting how I actually feel. I look old and sad and worn. I look like someone who stares blankly out windows and thinks of nothing.

I don’t feel like myself. Like the person who gladly spent half a day taking pictures in fields and didn’t immediately rush to share them on social media to get some likes and stay in people’s newsfeeds. Like the person who spent much of her time sewing her own one-of-a-kind clothes for years. Like the person who read books just for fun. Like the person who decided she’d like to learn guitar to do something for herself after she had a baby.

I don’t feel like myself.

I wonder if a newly emerged butterfly feels strange and unsettled. I wonder if there is a time when it doesn’t quite know what to do with itself—this ridiculous proboscis, these flamboyant wings! When it stares blankly at nothing.

I wonder if it would feel worse to go backwards, to start life as a butterfly and then emerge from a chrysalis as a fat, gooey caterpillar. Seems like it would have to. I don’t think that’s an inaccurate metaphor for how I feel sometimes. Like I used to be able to fly a delightful, meandering path through a colorful world, but now I’m just pulling these squishy segments of myself along, inch by inch, with my stubby green nubs.

I’ve spent more and more time not feeling like myself over the past five years. I even wrote a song about it a while back.

To some extent, the sentiments expressed in that song can be chalked up to midlife angst, feeling like time is passing by more quickly than it did during childhood, feeling keenly that there are things I just won’t get around to doing if I’m not more deliberate and mindful about it.

For my husband and me, this feeling of a clock running down has been put into high relief with the loss of both of our fathers to cancer in the past two years, one of whom was only in his late 60s. Add in the fact that in the course of just a few weeks our son turned sixteen, got a job, got his license, got a car, and has his first serious girlfriend, and yeah…I think we’re allowed to occasionally stare blankly out a window at the shock of it all.

Yet, I was feeling this sense of unease and un-self before all of this happened. I was feeling overly busy and asked to do and be things that, at my core, I am not. I was feeling some level of fear that if I didn’t check off all the right boxes in the right order at the right speed, someone else would get the spot that was meant for me.

That song? While the recording you see here was made yesterday, I wrote it in 2021.

Frankly, I’ve been feeling this way more or less since I started publishing books. Pulled in too many different directions. Asked to behave in a way that is contrary to my personality. Pressured to continuously engage people when my default setting is explore places. Asked to fulfill expectations when I prefer to delight in the unexpected. Encouraged to participate and make personal connections when I more naturally observe and make conceptual connections.

There’s no one right way to publish, but mostly, people want you to do the same things to increase your visibility and build your audience, even when they don’t have much hard evidence that those things are terribly effective. As the saying goes, nobody knows what things work but we know that doing things works. And before you suggest it, self-publishing is not the answer. I know all too well about what all those people at the publishing house do for your books and I know that I don’t want to have to do all of that myself. I value the people who work in traditional publishing and I value their contributions to the process of publishing great books.

But this is my life. It’s the only one I get on this earth, and I’m pretty sure there’s a reason I’m here. I need to use my time well, whatever time that turns out to be. So I don’t want to live my life according to someone else’s blueprint, on someone else’s timetable, projecting someone else’s personality. I don’t want to spend even a moment of it thinking about how to get more clicks, sell more copies, stay on people’s radar, or build the brand that is ME. I sure as heck don’t want to waste it making the kinds of little videos that people scroll away their own lives watching, despite the fact that authors are constantly being encouraged to become content creators.

Now that our son is driving himself to school, work, and martial arts classes, my husband and I have around 12 hours back every week when we would normally be shuttling him around. Yesterday, when I was staring at nothing? It was at the time of day I would normally have stopped working for an hour in the afternoon to drive nearly a half hour to his school, wait in the parking lot for 5-10 minutes, and then drive him home. It was my natural break time, a time I would normally be listening to music, enjoying a drive, then having a conversation. My brain knew it was time to do something different than the work I do in front of my laptop. But when my body didn’t get in the car and turn on the music, my brain glitched.

My daily rhythm since this child of mine first started school has changed—suddenly and dramatically. So perhaps all I need in order to feel more like myself again is to develop a new daily rhythm, rooted in a much older rhythm. One I had before I was publishing books, before I had a child, before every second of every day counted because otherwise how will I get everything done?

There’s a lot you can do with 12 more hours in a week, even if only half of them are typically yours. Maybe it’s time to actually start taking care of my own health by getting regular exercise. Maybe it’s time to enjoy a daily writing time that is about quality of words rather than quantity. Maybe it’s time to take a drive to somewhere I want to be. Maybe it’s time to break out the old camera again. Maybe it’s time to read a book that is not for my 9-to-5 job, not for a freelance job, not for another author seeking an endorsement, not for research.

Maybe, each day, I should take a little time just to stare at nothing, to think about nothing, to simply exist, completely apart from what I can do for other people.

Maybe, with more hours in the week, I could recover some version of my self that I see in childhood photos—the girl up in the tree with the band-aids and the butterfly wings and the jar with the holes nailed in the lid for catching and observing caterpillars.

The girl with nothing but time to do a whole lotta nothing. The girl who is actually enjoying each moment of the precious life she’s been given, a life that will one day end, whenever the Giver wills it.

As my sister keeps saying, life’s too short. In the wake of losing our dad, she’s been reordering her life to eliminate the things that bring her stress and dictate how she spends her time in order to prioritize a more open schedule that allows for more time to take care of herself and spend time with her loved ones. She even quit her job.

Life’s too short to waste it on making more money, gaining more followers, achieving more status, or accumulating more stuff that your kids will have to go through when you’re gone.

Life’s too short.

But I hope that whenever mine is over, Dad is waiting to greet me with a hug and a kiss and a “What took you so long?”