It's been 28 days since my first surgery. I was so naive about the recovery. I am historically inclined to overestimate my stamina and pain tolerance, but I really outdid myself this time. I went back to working from home full-time two weeks ago, and last week I went into the office four out of five days. I also somehow managed to bust a blood vessel in my eye and pull some part of me that used to be my full lat muscle so that on Thursday morning I tried to sit up in bed and couldn't.

It's odd, after a surgery, when you look fairly normal and you're trying to act normal and the world bustles on around you. It's almost harder psychologically when you still feel so vulnerable to jostling or seatbelt rubbing or even lifting something larger than a milk carton while trying to fake normal life. I remember not taking enough time after my lumpectomy and bursting into tears on Monday morning when someone asked me what I did over the weekend, because I had spent the weekend recovering from my Friday surgery and the loss of more than a third of my breast. I hadn't told most of my co-workers I had cancer.

Last week and this weekend, I suffered a very bad mood. There have been deep bouts of anxiety throughout this whole process. Some might have been influenced by all the painkillers, if I'm to believe their pharmacy inserts. Some of it, no doubt, is seasonal. Some hormonal. A lot related to my inability to do the things that help the most -- running, lifting weights, taking a bath. 

And the overwhelming realization that I didn't have to have reconstruction. I did this to myself.

So this morning, I woke up and looked outside and saw the sun shining. I went for a walk. I listened to an audiobook about a WWII bombadier/Olympic athlete who went down in the ocean, floated in a life raft for more than 40 days, and was captured and tortured as a PoW. What got him through the hardest parts, the book said, were stories. 

I've been working so hard I haven't touched my novel-in-progress since I got promoted. I wasn't even sure where it was, because I'd been writing it on a Mac desktop that died years ago.

Today I dug it out. The last date on it was August 26, 2015. 

I'm writing on a Chromebook now. I found some new software called Dabble. I signed up. I transferred the 17k words I have very little recollection of writing. I need a creative goal. I need a new story. I need to fall a little in love with my imagination again. 

ONWARD. 

Today I had a worlds-colliding moment when a new co-worker commented on an old practice of mine, which is to say, blogging. He called it "Facebook," which is totally fair - that's one of the places my blog bleeds out to. And he complimented me on my writing. In my head, I was all:

Thanks, sir; all the rest is mute.

        William Shakespeare

Because even now, when I went to put that quote in there, I had to pop the hood up on Typepad, creaky old bitch that she is, and look at the HTML, because the WYSIWYG editor doesn't even work anymore. I'm like the old couple in The Princess Bride who give you a cure for being only partially dead but then tell you to not go in swimming for at least an hour. "Well, hidee ho! Let's take a look at that href tag!"

But can I just say, wow, that felt amazing! Thank you, dude, for reading old words of mine from months ago and realizing I was a person before I came to the cube next door. I don't pay my corporate job any disservice, but it was still fun that for an amazing decade people paid me for my voice. 

A few weeks ago, one of the little angel's friends did THE OBVIOUS GAME for a book talk. I was driving them to whatever and heard her talking about how she chose the wig lady scene to highlight and I had this moment where I realized my daughter's best friends took my writing seriously enough to talk about it at school. 

Guys, I can't tell you.

I just can't tell you.

I have always been one to write fan letters to my favorite authors. I've never had a letter back, but I do believe they get read.

Always write fan letters.

My co-worker appreciating my past work. My daughter's friend -- someone I view like my own kid -- volunteering to use my work as a subject at school ... I can't even say what an honor and a privilege that is. 

Why thank you, sir.

This week, I've spent time thinking about how much my life has changed in the past decade. In 2008, I was fresh off the publication of my first book and in the heyday of blogging as a service, BaaS, if you will humor my acronyms.

Oh my, how life has changed.

In the time that has passed since my departure from BlogHer/SheKnows Media, I've ceased to have a professional reason to be on social media. And, to some extent, my appetite for it has decreased.

I finished another novel, which will come out from InkSpell Publishing in August 2019. It will be a labor of love, in that I care more about the themes of the book and in good sentences more than in the book's commercial success. That is a departure from my first two books. In those, I truly hoped for commercial success. Now, I understand a writer's chanches of making the front table at B&N are akin to a singer's chances of winning The Voice and then having a hit single a year later - so many people I talk to think somehow this art is different from that art, and ... it's not.

But that's okay.

There are too many people who think making art is only relevant if that art makes a living income. I know a lot of extremely talented artists and writers. Very few are able to survive solely on their art. Most depend also on income from speaking, teaching or brand representation. We no longer live in a society where artists have landed gentry sponsors.

So, why, if it is so hard to make a living at art, do we still make art?

Because it's important.

Rise up from your couches, oh, Americans. Break free from your must-see TV and your Facebook groups. You owe pop culture nothing.

You owe your soul everything.

I'm probably more than halfway though this life. I cherish all of you who have challenged me to jump off a platform beyond myself. I type tonight to remind you to do the same. This old blog is nearly dead, but in its last dying breaths, I encourage you to remember why we all started.

We wanted to connect. We wanted to be heard. 

We wanted to be bigger than we were from our couches, from our beds, from our little lives of quiet desperation. 

I may no longer self-identify as a blogger, but I was and will always be, a writer. And for the five of you who are still reading this blog, I think you do, too. 

We are writers. This is what we leave behind. 

Write good sentences. Observe your reality. Synthesize what you see.

Onward. 

It's a new day. 

In 2009, I left my corporate job for a job in the blogosphere. At the time, it was my dream job. We had a good run.

In that time,  I watched many of my contemporaries make a living from their words and then fall from the industry as the way media works changed. Now, my TIME magazine is 100 pages shorter per issue and the headlines are more dominated by the royal wedding than they are a school shooting or Hawaii being ruined by a volcano. I remember the day Osama bin Laden died. I found out on a Sunday night, around midnight. We needed to cover it. 

So it goes. Media has died. I half-heartedly spoon sand over it and click on the next cat video. 

In 2017, I re-entered corporate America. Two weeks ago, I landed back in the building I've always felt most comfortable in. The art hanging on the walls is familiar. My heels make the right noise walking across the tiles of the floor. Even the sound of the noise-canceling swoosh makes coming back seem normal and good. And the view from the 16th floor of an all-glass building made sunglasses inside seem not ridiculous.

I'm back at the company where I first took heat for blogging, back when blogging was a thing.

My co-workers at my last job, the first re-entry, would sigh and roll their eyes whenever I referenced the eight years I spent in media. "Oh," they'd say. "Are you talking about THAT again?"

That. 

When blogging was a thing.

I caught a few minutes of The Voice tonight. I haven't watched it since Christina Grimmie was killed. That was a bit of a perspective-setter about fame.

In this episode, Kelly Clarkson was having a moment. I assume from context clues that Alicia Keys has been nabbing all the hot young things to the extent it started to give Kelly a complex. She didn't even want to turn around for a fabulous voice because she said, "There's no way I will win," or something to that effect.

Oh, Kelly, I feel you.

This is not a love song.

Here's the thing: Any time you try something new, put yourself out there, no matter how high you've risen in your field or in your art, isn't there always an Alicia Keys? Isn't there always someone who intimidates you because they are amazing in their own skin, in their own art, and that confidence somehow feels threatening, as though there were a finite amount of wins in the universe?

Because there are not: A finite amount of wins.

Kelly Clarkson is a thousand million times more successful than I am, a thousand million times richer, more talented. In that moment, though, I wanted to grab her ears and look into her eyes and tell her to levelset, my friend, because you are all that and more and you need to have a Coke and a smile and shut the fuck up.

You. Are. All. That.

I know, right? Getting through a career is hard. It is so hard. You get knocked down, laid off, hired again, budget cut, high expectations, no expectations, no team, huge team, quarterly dividends, what did you say, again?

And then you start again.

Over and over and over. A fifty-year career is no longer a fifty-year career, it's ten careers, five years each. Constantly remaking yourself, retelling your story, resetting the chess piece on the board after life clears the coffee table.

And the only way out is through.

The only person who can pull you up and out is you.

Gone are the day of being told. Now are the days of telling, deciding, weighing, and doing.

It's a lot, my friends.

I've been talking to a young person trying to find his first job. It's awful, brutal, so hard. I get it. I remember. I got my first job coming off the recession that ended in the mid-nineties. Then I was working in an Internet start-up in 2000 when that bubble burst. And it's cute, because when I say the bubble burst to young people, they think I mean 2008. No, friend, that was the year after I sold my first house at a loss and went tens of thousands into debt. That year, I had a four-year-old and life got REALLY REAL because there was a little person in daycare that meant things to my career and my earning potential and my need to be available at home. I made some career-limiting choices to be present for the four-year-old, for the recession.

I don't regret those decisions, but that doesn't mean they didn't happen.

Up. And Down. And Up. It's okay, parents, to make decisions in your career for your kids and then later wish you hadn't needed to. That's human. And that's parenting. Learning to adult means weighing everyone's needs before you make a decision. And sometimes, it's not fun.

Young person, I said. I remember how hard it was to get a job at twenty-two. It's not that much easier at forty-four. The only way out is through.

And the only one who can save you is you.

Don't you give up, Kelly Clarkson.

Today I ate my lunch from a Tupperware-like-thing branded The Pioneer Woman. As I ate soup from this vessel, I mentioned to my new co- workers that I know Ree Drummond, have met her on a number of occasions and she is modest enough to introduce herself as someone who writes about cows, which is what I remember from the day when I sat beside her at BlogHer speaker training years ago, before the cookware line and TV show.

It is so weird trying to reconcile those days to now.

Trying to explain blogging in its heyday to nonbloggers who don't still get pitches for things I have no platform nor professional reason to cover. To explain that PR people still have me in some Guy Kawasaki list when I haven't covered Mother's Day in years.

I hit unsubscribe and feel weird that this is no longer my beat after spending a decade covering just that.

To read the MediaBistro headlines of another series of journalistic layoffs.

To realize that time has passed.

But it's okay. That was fun. It's time now to embrace AI, VR, a new generation of influence. I'm not primarily concerned with the bleeding edge now. I have a biopsy to schedule and a new job and a new career to manage. I'm not really your girl for Boppy technology. I'm more into YA novels and parenting a teenager. Please update your lists.

I look now to the female leaders in their third act, as I approach it. Show me Sheryl With the Rich Hair. Show me how to be mentored and to mentor. Show me what is next, now.

I'm only 43. I have a lot of career left. What do I focus on now?

I'm beta shopping my next novel. ritajarens@gmail.com if you want to weigh in. Onward.

And so, it begins.

I've returned to corporate America after seven years in yoga pants. I have a cube. I'm fully dressed and in a car by 7:30 am. I force myself to bed, Arianna-style, by 11 pm, even when my girl goes to bed at 10.

I'm fine with it.

Six months of unemployment taught me patience and tolerance and gratitude. The problems I face now are normal-people problems. When will I exercise? Clean my house? Help my girl with teenagerdom? Work on my novel? I plan and I calendar, but mostly I just enjoy being back in the land of the living.

Not waking up in a cold sweat.

Doing work I know is solid with a cheerful attitude that is not even fake because I have tasted the alternative.

I hope I never grow jaded again and I will always remember the alternative, which is staring down the face of uncertainty as your life savings quickly runs through your fingers for electricity and gas and groceries. And even these are First World problems.

I am back. I am editing PARKER CLEAVES again. I will resume my author newsletter. I will do my best at home and at work. And mostly I will remember to focus on the glorious fact that right now, nothing is wrong.

When my husband was unemployed, he regaled me with tales of the unemployment office. When my letter arrived last week instructing me to report today, I envisioned long lines of people (some smellier than others) based on his experience.

Some things must have changed in the past three years, because when I arrived, hardly anyone was there except the employees. I was immediately directed to a group of chairs facing a wall. I sat and read my library book for about fifteen minutes until I was joined by another woman about my age who would snurfle every few minutes in that way that indicates she got something up. I was busy being annoyed by that noise when the world's most enthusiastic job center employee burst upon the scene and invited us into a small room full of more chairs and a white board listing available seminars and recommended hot industries, such as healthcare and coding.

The man proceeded to act out everything he was saying with special voices, gestures and wild facial expressions while maintaining steely eye contact with me. Describing people who had worked for the same company for 25 years before they got laid off and didn't know how to interview? Looking at me. Discussing blind people who also have bills to pay and need jobs, too? Looking at me. Sharing about the two full-time representatives who are there specifically to help veterans? Looking at me. And every two or three minutes, the woman next to me would snurfle. She spoke up once to say she forgot her job sheet, which was the entire reason we were there. To show them the job sheets.

It was a little surreal. Like at one point during the presentation, I actually felt high from the combination of the room temperature, the direct eye contact and the awkward.

After the presentation, we were led to computers. Another guy cleared out the screen for me and told me I was going to take a test to see if I was smarter than a fifth grader. It was fourteen questions long. It turns out I am, indeed, smarter than a fifth grader, but I wonder how I would've felt if I had failed. I mean, hey, you're already unemployed - why not have your intelligence insulted at the same time? After my test, I had to go meet with the same guy who told me how he told all the guys who had been in manufacturing that the times are changing. How it's going to be just like when all the farmers stopped farming and went to build Ford trucks. How everything, EVERYTHING, was going to be in the coding, robotics and solar panels. Those manufacturing guys had better go back to school and learn to code or they were going to be left in the dust.

Did I know anything about solar panels?

No, I did not.

I tried to imagine what it would be like if I had just been laid off from my manufacturing job and this man told me I had to learn to code. Images of Donald Trump lawn signs floated through my head as I watched his mouth move.

After he was finished with me, I went to visit a woman who looked at my job sheet they'd sent in the mail and complimented me on my use of dates next to the entries. A lot of people don't put those in, she said. She pulled up my file and asked if I still had my S corp and verified my master's degree and took in the vision of me in ballcap, fleece and no makeup.

I asked her why my name had come up, if everyone's name comes up. She said yes, everyone comes up once, but she didn't know if I would come up again.

"What's the longest you've ever worked for a company?" she asked.

"Seven years," I said.

She looked back at my resume.

"You know, you need to make sure the next one is the right fit," she said. "Trust me, I know, I've been where you are, but make sure it's the right fit. Be patient. It will be okay."

She was the sanest person I'd talked to all day.

"Thank you," I said. "I really hope I never see you again."

"I hope not, too."

I walked back out into the autumn sunlight and tried not to think about solar panels.

When I was in my early twenties, my paternal grandparents died. It was the first time I suffered a great loss far away from my nuclear family. I lived in Chicago and received the news over the phone with no shoulder nearby to lean on.

I remember quite clearly sitting on my bed the night I learned about my grandfather, wrapped in a blanket they'd given me. It was a soft blanket. As I stroked it, I remember thinking I was off the hook from my usual worries, because not even I could hold myself to my schedule when this thing had just happened.

Back then only the death of a family member could make me give myself a break, let me live in the moment and admire the softness of a blanket.

Since turning forty two years ago, I've finally begun to let myself feel the blanket without first extracting a pound of flesh. This period since my lay-off (8/23/2016, FTW!) has introduced that thing I've always assumed would be the beginning of the end: losing my job. I've been steadily employed except for 12 weeks of maternity leave since 1996. Normally my mind would go straight from lay-off to bankruptcy to eviction. But somehow, because of the softness of a blanket, there have been three freelance projects and ten interviews and an upcoming reading and conference panel appearance. I haven't nailed my next step yet, but I haven't felt like a failure. And it's because of the blanket.

Mindfulness is a buzzword, for sure, but it is shockingly effective. My only regret now is that I suffered through so many years thinking if I stopped listening to my repetitive thoughts I'd somehow forget to breathe. I feel bad for the me of then. That time totally sucked.

And I thank God I didn't lose my job then. And to some extent that my husband lost his three years ago, giving me proof we could pull through a loss of half our income without losing our house. A dear friend told me then all I'd remember in the end was how we treated each other, and I really tried to set aside my worries and be supportive then, and I'm getting it back in spades now.

I know this period of changing seasons will pass. I'll find a new job. I'll end the era of working from home, an era that perfectly bookended my daughter's elementary school years (I'm grateful for that). I'll probably wish I'd worried and freelanced less during this time, but to some extent, that's just who I am.

But here I sit, wrapped in the blanket my sister bought me to replace the lost one from my grandparents.

And just now, I was thinking how soft it is.