tension headaches

I decided to take a wee bit of a break from blogging so I can pound out the rest of my book. It is oh so close to being entirely finished and that leaves me feeling all sorts of things. I feel sad and scared. Heartbroken and amazed. Inspired and refreshed. Angry and lonely. Grateful and awed. I’ve been working on my memoir since 2018. I wrote it relatively quickly, had almost three hundred pages by the end of the year. I thought that this was a good thing, that I had written it so fast, that I hadn’t let myself get sucked into it—heartbroken and destroyed by my memories transformed to words—over and over again. But then I started travel nursing and I learned more about myself than in all my years combined. i grew to be such a big tree, experiencing and welcoming all things above and below it. So that when I looked at my memoir, I couldn’t seem to see an end. I got lost in it all over again and felt silenced by my own words. So I decided to take a break from that too and write a blog until I felt ready again to put words to my memories.

I really wanted to publish it before 2020, but again, I’m a nurse, better yet, a travel one, which basically just means I’m a covid nurse. And wow. This past year has been hard. I had a friend tell me the other day that covid just seems to go wherever I go. I’m in southern Oregon now, working in the highest cases in the country hospital whereas up until this point, they hadn’t struggled with covid at all. Last year at this time, I was in Arizona while they were having their massive crisis. And after that, I was in Washington while it had it’s worse cases. I am so incredibly exhausted from all of this. I’m so heartbroken. I want to finish my book. Oh goodness, am I ready for it to be all done.

So I’m going to take a wee break from blogging so I can focus all my extra creative energy, which hasn’t felt like much recently, into something that has both haunted and ignited me. I really hope you read it and I really hope you like it, because gosh, it’s tough and beautiful to write.