i'm crazy and so are you
let's discuss and also happy 2024??? idk.
Wow it’s 2024. Queue all manner of shock and awe, passing of time is crazy, blah blah. I am feeling all kinds of feels lately, in particular because my personal life is so great, and in direct contrast, my business life is feeling very dim. Note that I didn’t say it IS dim, just that my perception is that it’s dim. TBD what the facts of the situation actually are. Tax season doth approach, after all.
Anywho, I haven’t written much because of many and such reasons, all of which I think I talked about in the last memoir? I can’t remember and also can’t be bothered to skim it and find out. I mostly came here to say hi, get my little fingies type-type-typing again - annoying, because I still have my long and fancy Christmas nails on, and holy shit is it annoying to type with these things. I also want to explore with you a bit why I have been resisting publishing some of the things I’ve written. And I just was reading one of my favorite newsletters - sadly not on Substack but via the good old fashioned email inbox - The Ann Freidman Weekly, and she wrote something about her own time and reflections that hit me:
…I’ve resisted the urge to polish it too much. Though I’m sure the buff of hindsight would make the story both cleaner and easier, it felt important to capture the ambivalence and chaos as it was happening.
After reading that, I immediately knew that was at least a large part of why I haven’t been publishing. I don’t want to polish what comes out in raw form because the raw form is impactful and truthful. Not that polish makes it UNtruthful, but it seems to me it might remove the actual realness of the moment. The vulnerability and difficult-ness of the situation. As Ann says, it feels important to capture the chaos - especially of stories that center around raising small children, of which chaos is the main character.
AND.
The unpolished stories feel SO RAW. It’s like, too much. I kept feeling like, well if I share this, everyone will KNOW. They’ll think I’m ungrateful, that I wish my children away, that I wish for a different life, or that I’m a bad mother.
This is all nonsense and bullshit! But I was and continue to feel it nonetheless. It comes from tiny well-meaning DMs from friends when I am particularly snarky. It comes from all of the “but it’s worth its” that get thrown around. It comes from seeing fellow small-child mothers share publicly about hearts living outside of bodies, while I know that behind the scenes, some of these same mothers are losing sleep to anxiety and wishing for a single quiet moment that never comes, just like me.
And it makes me wonder if I, too, should pretend? Is my heart also not walking around outside my body? Am I not also relishing extremely adorable Christmas morning moments? Etcetera??
I do not want to pretend. Because much like seeing some people publicly sharing that their kids are the worst helped me, I think the more we all share the Actual Realness™ the more we all help each other and can realize for ourselves: it’s ok, you’re doing fine, you’re not wrong, you’re not bad. A very funny reel I saw a few months ago said something like, no, you’re not crazy - we’re all going crazy. I need to find it and post. So perfect.
So anyway. I have a couple essays from the fall that - with the passage of time - now feel extremely dramatic and “too much.” But I want to honor past Sara, who was doing her best (and was also as yet unmedicated), and felt all the feelings. And if she felt them, then someone else must also. Even if that someone else is me, again. That got confusing.
I don’t wanna wait
for our lives to be over before I fulfill my destiny as a writer. LOL. 2024 is here and goal setting is here and I am not here for it. I’m setting NO GOALS, y’all. NONE. But I will say: I want writing and substack to be more part of my life this year. Thank you for being here and joining me. If you like my snark and also think kids ruin everything, please subscribe, send to a friend, or share. The more crazy people we reach, the better off we are, knowing that indeed, we’re all crazy here.
From my loud ones and I to you and your loud ones, happy new year. Can’t wait to share in all the crazy.
kbyeeeeee
