I seem to be on a lyric-driven title thing right now. I have no idea what that’s about but I’m going with it for the time being, even if I keep dating myself as clearly a 1900’er, as my son would say.

So it’s been one solid (business) week since I have been a free woman. Or a woman of leisure as Dave jokingly likes to call me, when he’s not calling me a kept woman, lol. Not long before bed tonight he turned to me and said, “So, how are you feeling?”

I admit, it took me off guard a little bit. I wasn’t expecting the question. I just remember thinking, it’s only been a couple of days what am I supposed to be thinking or feeling? Except it’s been a whole week. It definitely doesn’t feel like that. But when he asked the question I had to ask it of myself, right?

The truth is up until he asked the question it didn’t feel any different from just taking a week off of work. But once he asked it I realized that it was different in one way. Generally when I take a week off of work, which is not that common, I start feeling the stress on Friday. I suddenly realize that the week is “over,” yet it doesn’t feel like a week has gone by. I start immediately dreading going back to the normal day to day. But this week? The day-to-day doesn’t exist anymore. Everything is different. So I realized I don’t feel that sense of dread. If he hadn’t asked I don’t know that I would have ever noticed it.

So how do I feel? I guess the only way I can describe it is to say that I feel quiet. One part just needs the quiet, right? I have accomplished that goal apparently. I just don’t have all of the anxiety tramping through my brain like a herd of elephants through a muddy field. That’s a major difference that I didn’t appreciate until I stopped to think about it.

Do I still have apprehensions? To be sure. We agreed upon this week as a, you can just lay on the couch and do nothing because you’re going to need time to recover from being so stressed for so long. But beyond this week I have to start establishing a realistic and functional life. I’m not yet sure what that looks like. I have projects that I want to do which will take up some of my time. I have people I want to visit which will claim a little more of my life. But in the long run, what is going to be my new purpose?

In the long run I would say that my hope is to become an author. Right now I would say I’m a writer but to be an author means to publish stuff. I have my memoir (it seems really pretentious to talk about having a memoir when you’re not a person of any interest, but here we are) which I finished well over a year ago and have done nothing with. There’s some formatting issues with that that make it a little challenging to self-publish, but maybe now I have the time and the energy to overcome those challenges? I don’t know. I’ve tried to get multiple people to read it and it seems like nobody can get through it. It probably means I need an editor, but especially now I don’t think I can afford that, lol. That may be a dead end but I should probably at least look into it more.

But I also have a fiction book which I started writing and I’m multiple chapters into. Maybe I have time now to think how I’m going to flesh that out. That could be a real thing.

So all this to say that I’m not sure what life looks like going forward. I know I will figure it out. But at the moment, it’s all a bit of an enigma. The good news is I’ve had two blog posts in one week which is stellar based on the last couple of years. Even if I can’t finish that book at least I’m writing something, right?

So thank you all for reading. I don’t know if I’ve really said much in this post. Certainly not sure if I’ve said much of interest, but here I am. The whole point of this blog was to spill my brains onto a page, and that’s what I’m doing so I guess I am accomplishing my goal. Thank you again (and again) for coming along for the ride.