It has been an incredibly long time since I have posted on here.

I would apologize, but I feel that I’ve been very productive in my absence. (Okay, fine… I’ll apologize. But I will say that I’m doing much better than I would have expected back in April, when I posted my last blog post – you remember, the poem about anxiety? Yeah.)

I figured I’d take this time to break the ice, and get back into my routine for blogging. And because I’m now out of practice, I will start the routine with the easiest thing I can think of: an update.

So what has Sam been up to?

Well, for one thing, I took a running leap with my second novel, of which I’m about halfway through the first draft. It’s turning out to be a paranormal lit fic, so whoever decides to read that beast, bless you. Essentially, it’s a tale about an agnostic afterlife. Something that I’d never thought I’d write, or really knew what that meant, but here I am, writing it.

I’ve also been doing lots of work on the house, which is slow and laborious but starting to turn out quite nicely. I have a black dining room (to all who warned me not to do it, my conclusion is that it looks spectacular, thank you very much), and the beginnings of a painted bathroom on the first floor. I have water pressure in my second floor bathroom (no shower there yet, but soon!), and I have the makings of a yard/patio that I’m proud of.

And I have an AC unit on my first floor now. THANK GOD. Anyone who stood in my dining room for more than ten seconds last summer can attest to how wonderful that fact is.

Let’s see, some other updates. Oh, yes… I’m feeling more myself lately.

This has been a strange journey, one which I tried to be as open as possible about, but because of the weight it had in my life, I think I mostly shut down and floundered alone. About halfway through last summer, I experienced a disconnect from my identity. I still am not entirely sure how to describe it, other than that I didn’t feel right, and I didn’t feel like it was me in my body. I slowly became introverted, and more anxious – probably more anxious than I’ve ever felt before – and I isolated myself from others like I never had before.

I’m usually the one who reaches out to people when it comes to my friendships, and this is something I’ve always been okay with, because I like people, and I like being connected with them. But when this weird thing happened, I just… gave up. I think I may have pushed away some friends in the process, but I’m working on patching those relationships now as I come to understand what is going on in the brain of Sam.

It was so strange, because I came to hate “myself” (because it wasn’t me), and thought, well, no one else can like this new thing that I’ve become because I don’t want to stay that way. And so I ran. I holed myself up in my house, and when I did poke my head out to see people, I think I just depressed them because I didn’t know how to handle myself, really.

What I had to learn, I think — or, at the very least, reteach myself — was that people are supposed to be in constant flux. I felt unlike myself not because I wasn’t myself – nope, I’ll always be me — but because I was transforming into something that I wasn’t familiar with. A butterfly, unsure of what to do with her wings.

Fast forward to around January, in which I started feeling a little more normal. Not fully, but more fully. The cocoon I had been in for close to six months was now relinquishing its hold just a bit, and I suddenly found myself able to breathe.

The trick was, in my “not-me-ness”, I had stopped having night terrors — and then as I started to go back to normal, the night terrors came back with a vengeance. Which, I mean… Guess that proved I was going back to normal, right?

But what if, I thought – WHAT IF I could be normal without the night terrors? So I set up an appointment with a neurologist, the neurologist threw medicine at me, I had a bad reaction to the medicine — and then I stopped taking it, cancelled my next appointment, and am now just avoiding the fact that having night terrors every night is a problem. There. How’s that for adulthood?

Okay, so maybe I’m not fully ready to tackle my night terrors. And that’s fine. I mean, it’s not convenient, but I’m still working on myself in other ways. I’ve been trying some new things in terms of lifestyle, and productivity, which at some point I’ll deign worthy of a blog post. I’m working on a five year plan to switch to writing full-time (cross your fingers for me). I’m taking deep breaths, and trying to absorb the good around me — trying to tap into that “me-ness” I had before, without ignoring the “me” I am now.

Also, I have two cats now. And yes, I’m cutting myself off at two.

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