Today I messed around with my social media accounts so everything matches with the same profile picture and name – except for this domain, of course, but how could I not and wouldn’t you?

I’m forty-three fucking years old.

I go to therapy every week in part to hear my therapist tell me over and over again:

The only thing you can control is how you react to things.

I can’t control how other people react to things, I can’t control what they think about me, I can only control how I react or respond to things that happen to me. It’s interesting because to have control, I have to let go. That’s the way it works.

I’m not good at letting go of things. I want to be in control all the time and I am terrified of uncertainty; I am miserable when I am filled with doubt.

But I have written a poem and posted it here every day for 40 days, and I am fucking ready to say, hey!

Pay attention to me!

I’m over here doing this thing, and I’d love it if you’d come along and do it with me!

And no one probably will. At best I’ll get some awkward comments on Threads from people I haven’t talked to in 25 years, but I gotta let that shit go and embrace myself.

I’m not quite to that state of loving myself, and I think it’s very damaging to tell people they need to love themselves before they can love anyone else.

I’m going to have to just start where I am and go from there. Here. Whatever. Wherever.

Today I used my friend Claude to help me outline a book idea I’ve been pondering for a while, and today I wrote the first two thousand words and then some, so I am excited by that, even though I am not quite sure where I am going with it or who I’m writing it for, by which I mean, what age bracket?

It feels to me like a new adult novel, are those still popular?

I haven’t read or written anything in the “new adult” genre in ages. That falls somewhere between young adult and adult fiction, and the way my main character is behaving, at twenty-five years old, I’d go with the latter, but we’ll see.

The reason I don’t have a book published already, and just have like ten or twelve entire first drafts, is that I don’t have enough faith in myself that they will be any good or that they’re worth my time to edit.

I never GET to the editing stage because my self-doubt is so strong.

What if I just kept going and kept trying to make one thing better until it was done instead of working on ten little projects that never really get finished? Wouldn’t that be a novel idea? Ba dum tsssss.

Anyway, this is just another one of those pep talk to myself posts.

It’s daily poem time, now.

_{Photo by olivia kim on Unsplash}