This is a whining post. If you don’t want to hear it, check in on Monday for a more grown-up Author Update. 😛

Words: 985
Time to read: 5 minutes

A friend of mine, well, we haven’t been friends for a while now but we’ve remained… acquaintances?, wrote all her friends/followers/readers and told them that she was leaving the writing/author community… again. I don’t mean to pick on her, but she does this every once in a while, and every time she does, I get reflective and think about where I am and where I want to be.

I’ve been writing and publishing for about eight years now, and I have never left, have never unpublished books, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t struggled finding my place. I think we all do, on some level, looking for a community or looking for readers and building a fanbase. We write and write and work and work and we realize that no matter how hard we run on that treadmill, after you turn it off, you’re in the same place, a tired and a sweaty mess.

She’s disappeared a few times now, trying to find her own place in life and in the writing/author community, and honestly, I don’t know what she’s looking for. She probably doesn’t know either, and it’s not so difficult to say if you don’t know what you’re looking for, you can’t find it.

I hate when she does this because I always feel bad for her, though she’s not looking for sympathy. I think she wants to be a writer, wants to be an author who sells books, but I don’t know what’s standing in her way. I’ve never been the type of person whose identity depends on a label. I was never only a wife, never only a mother, never only a daughter, or a sister, or anything else I’ve been over the years, and while I don’t want to assume, it does seem she relies on other people to tell her who she is. I’ve always been my own person and maybe she struggles with that. I have no idea. You have to be selfish if you want to be a writer, work hard on something you love that others deem frivolous and unnecessary. Especially if you’re not making money yet. Maybe she bowed under the guilt of taking time for herself. You have to, or you don’t have time to write.

Whenever she makes these announcements, I wish she would be more forthcoming, not to give us any explanations because she certainly doesn’t owe us any, but so I can pick through whatever I feel whenever she does this. Though, her job isn’t to make me feel better about her leaving. That’s silly.

Sometimes I think a lot of this hollowness I (sometimes) feel is because I haven’t been well over the past three years. Health is can be taken for granted, and it’s only when you lose it do you realize how much you miss it. A memory on Facebook from four years ago popped up on my timeline yesterday, a selfie I took because I was having a good hair day.

Of course, a lot goes into happiness than just how you feel. My ex-fiancé wasn’t an ex, so we were probably in an okay place. I hadn’t lost a couple of my cats, and the deaths of Harley and Blaze hit me hard. I might even have still been going into my workplace–though I enjoy working from home now, the transition wasn’t smooth.

While I’m not feeling as terrible as I did before my Mayo Clinic appointment in February, I’m not feeling as great as I hoped either. But, having a diagnosis has helped the mental part of it. Not knowing why you feel like crap is worse than feeling like garbage but at least understanding why–even if there really is no cure.

I can blame working on this series for so long… I’m tired, but working on something new won’t help. Same day, different document. Hoping that maybe this will be the book that will turn the tide.

I don’t feel this melancholy all the time. I’ve actually had to be in pretty good mental health to withstand three years of feeling like I have. I doubt I would even be feeling this way at all this morning if it wasn’t for her announcement, and is it selfish to wish that if she’s going to leave, that she would just stay gone? If she really doesn’t want to write anymore that she would find something else to do? Either that or if she ever does come back, that I’m in a different place so I don’t notice.

I’m not even sure what the point of this post is except I needed a place to put my feelings, and besides a handful of friends who are too busy navigating their own lives to listen to me moan about my “problems” that I admit, aren’t really problems, there really is no one else. I go through this every now and then, feeling lost, but at the same time, walking on a path I know I want to be on, heading in the direction I know I want to go. Can you be lost when you’re doing that?

I have no idea.

Anyway, so when she says she’s leaving, she usually goes all in, and I ordered her paperback just in case she unpublishes. I helped her design her cover, and I’ll just put her book with the rest of my indies on my bookshelf and she’ll turn into someone I used to know along with most of the authors there.

But I do know one thing–I should shower and open my blinds.

I have a roast in the slow cooker and a series to finish.

I know where I’m going, and I’m finding happiness in the journey.

I hope that she does too–wherever it is she’s going.