I cannot pinpoint exactly what went wrong this year but it started with sudden weight loss and insomnia and hair loss and skin eruptions and severe unrelenting anxiety and you know when you learn new words to help better define your world? I highlighted ANHEDONIA in the Oxford: the inability to feel pleasure. “Ahhh, sounds about right. Dead-voiced yay.” Dictionary footnote: Maybe just don’t get off your meds, ok.

“My books will be my kids,” I’ve said since I was 20. But what if I never wrote any books, and it’s too late to have kids, and what if I always thought all the gutting and hilarious and hideous things that happened were the ultimate storytelling fodder, but what if I was just dissociating from my real life, fictionalizing it in real time, instead?

Here I am, 44, looking at myself dead-eyed in more ways than one. A pale vintage childless cat lady in a desolate red state in a white vintage Caddy with an unstoppable avoidant attachment style that wishy-washes out my desire for both “real” relationships and w2 employment.

Here I am, now, wild and free as a tumbling tumbleweed, come hell or JD Vance or high water. Meds finally fully kicked in again. The recent three trimesters of mental ill winds reminding me once again of all the wastelands I’ve walked through and survived. Reminding me of all the depressive brainwaves that were my normal for decades. Reminding me that I (eventually, historically) always make it to the other side. Again and again. Lone wolf and in style. Because that’s how I rolling stone.

This time up the Sisyphusian hill, I told myself, “I know you don’t feel like doing anything right now, but do this for future Jessica ok?” So former Jessica of 2024 got up at 6:30 am after staring at the ceiling for hours and went to BodyPump at the Y. And found some steady employ to lay under her feet. And pushed her projects and friendships forward. And paid her bills and cleaned her house. Even when she didn’t feel like doing anything. Like not fucking anything.

She waved a white flag at her prostrate psyche and came clean: “OK TRUCE, THEN. Maybe I will not be the literary writer I always thought I’d be, and maybe I will not be famous, and maybe I will not step on stages in front of 1000s, but I will sit here alone, stubbornly, until I feel that ecstatic core fire of creativity again.” And she back-burned her ego away from the center of it all. And she silently waited. And waited. And waited. To feel any warmth at all.

I don’t know what it is yet, but I’m feeling the flame again. It’s a more grounded fire, this time. Cheeps are Cheeping in my soul and closet again in a real birdsong way too.

All I can do is fly on and see what I can sew in my second half. Whichever way the wind blows.

I have to get the dress and shit out of my Caddy but I’ll give you label and price deets later….