I've been putting off this newsletter again, mainly because the things I'd like to write about require me to get autobiographical and vulnerable, and I don't particularly want to write like that right now.
And also: I've been a little sad.
I'm not depressed or anything. I'm just blah inside. Gloomy. Low energy -- literally and figuratively. January is always rough for me. It's usually my busiest month at my day job, and this year has been no exception.
I've been more overwhelmed before; this year isn't that bad, to be honest. But everything is making me mildly sad. I'm a little bit socially isolated, and that makes me sad. Watching television makes me sad. I finished reading a really funny urban fantasy novel yesterday, and then I was sad that it was over. No matter what I try, my monstera plant seems to be dying, and that makes me sad. I'm a glum, overstretched, melancholy plant killer.
I listen to music I like, and it makes me sad. I hear music I don't like, and that makes me even sadder. I absolutely love going to the library, and the last time I went? You guessed it: The trip made me unaccountably sad. I'm even sad that Grammarly will be savage when it proofreads this newsletter because I've used the word "sad" way too many times, and it hates when I do stuff like that. (It also hates long sentences and short sentences and anything that isn't vanilla af, but my weird relationship with the AI tool that checks my writing for grammatical errors isn't the point here.)
Look, I'll be fine soon enough. All of this will pass quickly. By mid-February, daylight hours will be longer, all of the 1099s and W2s I've been scrambling to finish will be long forgotten, and I'll have gotten a new plant that will hopefully be harder to kill. In the meantime, I'll just put on "Disintegration," stare out the window at this grey weather for a while, and try to keep my sighing to a bare minimum while I ride this out.
If it helps, I've been crying ALL month.
Even as I was eating delicious strawberry shortcake with my sister I cried because I wished I had a boyfriend to eat it with.
My sister was like, 'Geesh can't you appreciate the people you're actually with right now?'😅
But I carried on crying 🍰