Mercy Celeste

I’ve lost track of how many posts I’ve started over the past couple of weeks or so only to have something come up, save the post to draft, and never get back to the post.

Three, maybe five. By the time I can get back the need to discuss that has died, or the reason is no longer timely.

Meh. Does it really matter? No one reads blog posts anymore anyway. It’s a dying medium.

It’s dead.

I think I’m the only writer I know who still attempts a blog. Most websites are just that, websites. Static pages with, usually, out of date book news.

I should go back to social media.

Should.

I do visit social media. I check FB and Twitter (no, I will not call it the new name) daily. I keep up with world events on Twitter. I keep up with rage baiting on Twitter too. I try to limit Twitter to save my sanity. On FB I check in on friends, maybe comment, but I rarely see anything new, and honestly, the longer I’m avoiding posting the more I feel left behind.

I am not going to say I feel abandoned by friends. I do, but it’s not their fault. I chose to move out of their neighborhood, so to speak, and now I’m an outsider looking in. But really it’s more like… I never fit in there to begin with and I was pasting on a fake grin and attempting to be normal. When I’m not normal.

Honestly, I just got tired of posting vapid, inane comments about the weather or my pets because I couldn’t think of anything engaging to discuss.

I don’t go anywhere anymore. I don’t meet anyone. I keep to myself. I don’t get around well anymore. I don’t have time or transportation… so, yeah, as I become more isolated, I isolate more. I am aware of what I’m doing. I just really don’t much care to attempt a course correction.

I have real friends. People I’ve known forever, and we keep in touch, but like me they’re busy, we’re all busy. We’re old and busy with lives that don’t include each other. As it should be, but damn, it gets lonely sometimes. Of course, I could be lonely in a room full of people, and let’s be honest, I’m, usually, lonelier in a room full of people.

So, yes, I’ve been busy shutting down, and sometimes I feel forgotten. But that’s been the way of it my entire life. I have been forgotten mid-sentence on more than one occasion. Had people turn their back on me and take up a conversation with someone else right in front of me as if I suddenly ceased to exist…

Sighs… I don’t know if I’m feeling sorry for myself right now. Honestly, I can’t tell. Honestly, I feel… strangely free. I don’t know how to explain it.

Like I was going through the motions but wasn’t really there with people I knew weren’t really there for me, just… I don’t know…

Part of this is because we’re exactly one month away from the end of my youngest’s high school days. A month and a half until graduation. And that’s all I’m living for. To get this one last baby grown, and onto their next phase of life. Which opens up a whole nuther can of worms. That with each passing month is driven home, that I have spent my entire life, all of it, taking care of the people I love, knowing damn well that the people I love wouldn’t even bother to step over me if I fell in front of them. Not including my youngest. At least not yet. I believe they’ve watched their siblings turn into the people they became and has felt that rejection even more keenly that I have. But that’s a topic I don’t often discuss… I share a room with a person that will not notice if I died in my sleep… and to know that, to live with that knowledge of just how little you mean to the people who mean the most to you… it’s… numbing.

But here I stay, because, hell, does it matter. I stayed this long.

Is this post about books and stories and social media or the things I don’t talk about?

It’s all the same. I write to deal with the part of life I have no control over. I write to keep myself sane. The part I have no control over now controls me and destroys my urge to write.

I don’t want to write about happy ever afters when there really is no such thing… rinse, repeat.

Then there’s the state of the publishing world. The constant drama. The constant scandal. The oversaturation of shitty books. Authors who behave so very badly and give the rest of us a bad name. Entitled readers who destroy the moment their demands aren’t met… round and round the mulberry bush the monkey chased the weasel…

I’m just fucking exhausted. I’m sick of everybody’s shit. I’m absolutely fucking over all of it.

So, yes, I’ve done in my online life what I want to do in my real life. Walk away. I want to sell everything I own, park my kid in college… as much as I love them and feel they are the best part of my life right now… I want to spend the rest of my life, not taking care of anyone but me.

Will I do that?

No. I can’t afford to walk away anymore than I can afford to walk away from writing. But sometimes… SOMETIMES…

What would you do if you won the lottery?

Me, I’d pay off my house, and… well, that would be telling, now wouldn’t it…………..

 

Mercy