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Okay okay I'm still here! I'm still here.

My blogging (for all of my reader out there who have been worried, and no, I did not forget a pluralization) has stalled out the last week and a half for two reasons: 1.) Holy shit that three-week cold kicked my ass and drained my will to live (but not my sinuses), and 2.) Since I started feeling better over the weekend I have focused feverishly on my fiction. 

Oh my god it feels amazing to write again.  I find myself living in this story I'm crafting any time my mind has a free moment.  I love my characters.  (Meg would say it's because I love myself lol. She's not wrong.)  I can't stop writing.  And I have finally figured out how to work with my quick-shifting attention span as a writer and adapt it into a narrative style that allows me to keep writing without getting bored. 

Meg and I were talking earlier today about writing and creativity.  I told her some of what my therapist Frank and I have been talking about, regarding writing (I'll come back to Frank in a minute, he's seriously the best): How timing is everything, how this is the first time in my life I've been in a position to write something that could turn into a finished product (I'm actually writing this for publication -- first time I've ever written anything with a publication goal beyond hitting the "publish" button on a blog post): I have a stable life and career; I have finally started to write from healthiness and not from trauma; at thirty-six I now have a tiny bit more life experience than I did in my 20s so I have a little more that is worthwhile to say, at least in terms of resilience and thriving; and now that life has evened out and I'm a fully-fledged adult, I'm also realizing that this is life, and it will never get any less busy or any less complex, and if I'm ever going to do what I've always wanted to do, I have to figure out ways to work it in, right fucking now, because life is really, really short, and if I don't do this now, it might never happen.  This is -- maturity, maybe?  (Perish the thought.)  Also, alongside the idea of having more life experience is having more self-knowledge, and figuring out how to write what I LIKE, not just what I know. 

In short, it's all starting to come together, and I think I have a staying power now that I lacked when I was struggling under the crushing ocean-depth of depression.  (Fuck you, depression.  I don't live in you anymore.)  I think this newest project can actually go somewhere.

All of which is en-joy-ing.  (Enjoy. Literally, to fill with joy.)

Last night at therapy I was telling Frank how fucking heartbreaking and how fucking enraging and how fucking exhausting sexism is.  Like many Hillary supporters, I hit a point after the very personal slap in the face that was the 2016 election where I was just fucking done.  Just done.  Sexism can kiss my ass.  I have no time or patience for it when it rears its stupid misogynistic head, and I have stopped being nice about it. 

But it's exhausting.  Humans weren't built to be angry all the time.  And I have been angry so much of the time.

So after I run out of rant and just sit on the couch looking tiredly at Frank, he asks, very simply, "When was the last time you went shooting?"

"Oh fuck, it's been years," I said.

"That's your assignment," he said.

And I perked up like a Sarah who has just smelled coffee in the morning.  I asked him some questions about good ranges to visit around here, and where to buy ammo, and then said, "Awesome. I'll have to teach myself how to clean my gun" (thinking of YouTube, that bastion of self-help), when Frank said, "Bring it next week and I'll teach you."

So my therapy next week will consist of learning how to clean my gun.  That's some pretty badass therapy.

Writing and shooting (I'm a pretty textbook liberal in so many respects, and I fervently support stringent gun control, but baby, I do like target shooting, and my girl Dirty Harriet is a bad. ass. bitch).  Not a bad week so far.