This week, my daughter finally got her license, a month and a week after the intended date circled on my calendar. I took her birthday off months in advance, but when April 6 rolled around, all the government offices were closed. School was closed, the sleepover was weeks beyond cancelled. Life felt cancelled. We spent the day instead celebrating her existence any way I could think to do.

As Missouri and the world cautiously peeps out from behind closed drapes, I'm vacillating wildly inside. Part of me looks at those around me cavalierly chatting an arms' length away without a mask or apparently a care in the world and wonders if I am punishing myself and my family unreasonably. The other part keeps clicking on horrifying tales from Queens hospitals as if to remind myself why I'm home. We found this fawn in our yard this morning. Animal Control thinks he may have been born last night. I check on him every few hours to see if his mama has come back yet. His pose is my mental state during the pandemic. 

At the beginning of all this, I bought new novel-writing software and dug out the novel-in-progress I started multiple years ago. I, like many, thought I'd be so productive without commuting or being able to socialize outside my yard. I misestimated how much mental effort it would take to keep myself grounded from day to day. The level of effort to keep my anxiety from spiralling out of control has ebbed and fallen. I never know if tonight I will wake up at four am unable to find my way back to sleep, or if I'll hit my alarm five times with the feeling of dead exhaustion I haven't experienced since my vitamin D levels dropped dangerously in 2016. Or if I'll pop out of bed hungry and ready to smell the flowers. I have so many thoughts every day of ideas for short stories and novels and blog posts and advice columns that I know I should write before I forget them. ("I used to be funny," I said not that long ago to a new co-worker.)

Today I dragged my laptop outside to see how much our money we gave to Instacart this week and saw a post from my friend Deborah Siegel in my inbox. It had been there for a while. Getting myself to read my personal email is as hard as getting me to log into social media. The post talked about writers not writing during the pandemic. I wanted to cry. The way I have dealt with every scary thing in my life has always been to write about it. So I'm making myself put at least a few paragraphs down so I won't forget what this felt like. I write to remember, so I can remember later what it felt like to live my life.

It's shocking how easy it is to forget your own story.

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. 

Over the past year or so, I've been having what I'll call a stress dream over finding an apartment because I suddenly realize I have to go back to college.

I graduated from the University of Iowa over twenty years ago. In all the time I lived there, through two dorm rooms, one sorority house and three apartments with approximately fifteen roommates, I don't recall losing any sleep over where I was going to live. 

I didn't go to graduate school in Iowa City. I went to graduate school in Kansas City, as an adult living with my now husband.

I have no idea why I've constructed this storyline in my head.

I realized last night that I have a created a whole town in dreamland that doesn't exist in reality, and I've revisited it several times now.

There's the two-story duplex with the leaky sunporch and hilly back garden planted with flowers I don't know how to grow. Its windows and doors don't lock, and I'm constantly closing the shades. It has a pool I have no idea how to chlorinate. It's on a street that doesn't exist and that I've researched several times over the past year in my dreams, trying to find my way back to my bedroom there, the one with the four-poster bed I've never owned.

The union where I buy groceries in my dreams is located just south of a four-story library I never saw in real life but where I study constantly in my dreams, sure I'm about to fail. There is a cupola at the top that plays calliope music at all times.

Raindrops on roses, and whiskers on kittens.

In this town, I keep driving past a row of restaurants in Omaha that doesn't exist. I really like the Mexican one on the end with an ice cream parlor adjacent.

Brown paper packages tied up with ribbons.

We try to get a table more than once at the Mexican restaurant and are turned away because our group is too big. I don't recognize the people in my group, but they are very important to me.

The row of restaurants turns into a train line into the north loop of Chicago. I am very worried about missing my transfer to the library on the north end that I've never been to. Someone important lives two blocks south. There are no Ubers, only cabs. I can never catch one. I get back on the train to Naperville.

Snow geese that fly with the moon on their wings.

At the end of the line, a hyperloop takes me back to my sorority house in Iowa City. It has burned down, its ashes still smoking.

I flee, park my car in a six-story parking garage by Currier Hall, where I have a room on retainer up three flights of stairs. My parking space is eternal.

My cat lives there. I will always forget to feed it. It will cry out every time I open the door, and I will be terrified I have starved it, because I am so stupid I forgot to feed it.

I don't know which cat. There have been five in my adult life.

These are a few of my favorite things.

I've been back to this place enough times over the past few years that I recognize the stairwell in the dorm, the elevator that spins when I try to take it to a floor that no longer exists. It makes me nauseaus to get on the elevator, but I still do it, and it never goes where I think it will go. It spits me out on a different floor every time. The doors are adorned with handwritten welcome signs for kids I never met, never will meet. 

Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes.

The garden in the duplex dies and revives as different people move in behind it and sink swimming pools with no water in the backyard. Nobody ever buys the vacant lot next door.

Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes.

Sometimes the duplex bedrooms grow huge and comprise city blocks filled with young people I've never met but who know my name. They never get out of bed but call to me to come join them.

Silver white winters that melt into springs.

I don't understand this dream, or why it keeps coming to me over and over throughout the years, much like the mansion with the ghosts in the ceiling tiles and the ballroom floors that haunted me ten years ago. The one with the roof that kept burning and falling, over and over, the one with the basement that filled with water every few minutes, then drained to reveal rotting floorboards.

These are a few of my favorite things.

I wonder why these neighborhoods are so real to me.

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.

Sign up in the left nav to get my now quarterly newsletter. 'Cuz there's news in there, seriously.

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.

Since I've started my new job (at almost seven months in, it's almost not new anymore), I've endured an hour-long commute each way. Some days, when Beloved is in town, we carpool. Other days, when I drive myself, I've discovered Overdrive, which allows me to check audiobooks out from my library for free. I've never been much for thrillers, but I-70 is so horrifying with people going from 75 miles an hour to full stop while texting, that I've realized thrillers and biographies are about as deep as I can go while driving. Plus the cumulative fatigue from radiation makes me want to fall asleep when the traffic gets slow, so I need some action on the audiobook to keep me awake.

As far as thrillers go, I've enjoyed Ruth Ware, particularly as all her audiobooks are narrated by Imogene Church, whose British accent makes both "What?" and "Stupid!" sound like the most profound words ever spoken in the English language. This last week, I also listened to AMERICAN SNIPER, the autobiography of celebrated sniper Chris Kyle, and that inspired a spirited discussion at home regarding war and the mindset required for war and my own personal existential crises triggered by war (in high school I discovered CATCH-22, the first book to truly encapsulate the way I feel about war, so that pretty much explains my perspective). I'm pretty sure we agreed to disagree, with my husband assured we'd all die if I were in charge, and I assured that if we did, it would be with a clear conscience.

Prior to Ruth, I went through another of my Neil Gaiman phases. Let me recommend anything by Neil Gaiman on audiobook, because he reads all his own stuff. NEVERWHERE is particularly wonderful, and you'll never think of the London tube system in the same way ever again. I haven't even been to London, but the angel of Islington is on my mind all the time.

Listening to books is so much different than reading them. You're still living in someone's head, but it's a much slower process. I remember when my third grade teacher used to read to us, particularly BUNNICULA. How soothing it is to be read to. I only wish I could do voices. I'd surely love to be an audiobook talent if I could do voices and accents. Alas.

Where was I going with this? The stories. The days have started to bleed together, and I've had to take walks every day at work to avoid falling asleep from the radiation fatigue. When I go for walks, I wear my headphones, and I listen to my stories. For most of this month, I was in Fallujah and Ramadi hearing about badasses, then it flipped to a reach in England I can't find when I try to look it up. I was hoping it was based on a real place so I could see it, the way I searched in vain for Stephen King's DUMA KEY.

The stories have also interspersed with my stress dreams. There's the one where I'm cleaning grout in my bathroom. There's the one where I'm trying to step on the brakes in Vicki the destroyed convertible, and the car won't stop. There's the recurring one where I'm going back to college again, even though I went twice, but this time I have nowhere to live and the stress of finding somewhere to sleep is all I can concentrate on.

I keep having these dreams where I work all night, and I wake up with my neck muscles tight, feeling like I haven't slept at all.

And so, in a sleep-drunk blur, I immerse myself back in the stories.

When my leg was broken, I read my way through Stephen King's THE DARK TOWER series. Now my Goodreads list functions like a touchstone for what I'm going through, business books reflecting my ambition and political autobiographies and novels my confusion about the stories the news is telling me.

Truth be told, I'm a little scared by the changing weather patterns and the hostility between nations.

Truth be told, I'd rather read novels than the nightly news. At this point, truth is stranger than fiction.

I'm still working on my own stories, but more and more I'm adding my own life back into something that was supposed to be entirely fiction. We'll see if that works. Maybe it won't. At the end of the day, immersing myself in stories feels better than immersing myself in the chaos going on in the world.

Watching my daughter watching the sun
makes me reflect on the races I've run.
Hers are still all out in front.
Mine reflect how I was wont.
Out past forty and turning the corner
forget whatever I had planned.

But the waves that grind pink shells to the sand
also carry great ships into land.
Old man in blue trunks with a metal detector
hoping to find some middle class treasure;
we are all here trying to recapture
the first bead on the strand.

They always say you're nothing without your health.
I learned that this year, through their stealth,
breast cancer was hiding
in my body subsiding,
I used to fear really big things.
Now I understand--

the worst things can be held in your hand.

Earlier this week, my publisher at Chicago Review Press called me. Hearing her voice reminded me of the thrill I felt ten years ago, standing in a conference room at H&R Block corporate HQ hearing my first book had just been bought. And I sold it all by myself.

She was calling to say it was time. There were three boxes left, total. Did I want to buy them?

I reveal this with the intention of giving aspiring authors a gift. Sometimes you hit the five reprint lottery, and sometimes you are lucky to help start a category but don't own it. Hey, them's the breaks.

I can safely say I'm in a good mental health place because being asked if I want to buy the final physical copies of SIFTW didn't make me cry. I just bought them. I'm going to do a workshop on publishing of which they'll be part, but mostly I hold them to treasure the memory of the excitement and wonder and pride I felt in 2008 because I told myself when I was 12 I'd publish a book, and now I've done it twice. And I gave a copy of SIFTW to my new co-worker with twins and he said his first book had come out goddamn never.

SIFTW lives on now only digitally. But it still happened. OMG, you guys, that was the best. I'm not even embarrassed to admit how excited I was at this thing blogging that would give normal
people a platform from which to jump beyond themselves.

Those were lovely days. I was lucky to participate.

So I have 64 pounds of books in my library and my husband and daughter are rolling their eyes, but I've given up Rita the blogger and Rita the speaker. I don't care if my books go out of print. I remain Rita the author.

Goddamnit. It is glorious. And it is not yet over. I will it so. Onward.