To Glance Back and Look Ahead - 2017

For all those wondering, this blog post will cover my recent absences and what I'm looking to improve upon with the upcoming year. I hope you'll all enjoy this little extra look into my life.

To put things mildly, I don't even know how to begin to describe the last year of my life.

One of the thoughts that I've always held most dear is that things will always get better. It didn't matter if everything went to hell in a matter of minutes, so long as we would find a way out of it; and this year has been proof of that in more ways than one. Just when things seemed to be going well, it was as if life threw in a little something to even the scales once again (and then the scales would somehow shift for the worse again and we'd have to dig our way back out).

The year started off with a bang - a few things here at home working out for the better and my unexpected winning of a writing contest throwing the family into celebration for the better portion of February, it seemed as if it was finally our year. For the first time since 2014, all operations were running smoothly. It felt like I didn't have to worry or keep looking over my shoulder anymore. But of course, with all good comes a little bad.

One of the biggest troubles with 2017 was the unpredictability that has always toyed with our lives. Many of the endeavors that had become constants in our family came to an end towards the earlier part of this year. With those endings came new beginnings and uncharted territory. None of us knew how to live our lives without trivial things like high school or having to juggle dramas outside of our immediate family of three (four including our beloved cat). Trying to find a new rhythm became our mission for the summer and fall.

Without much warning, around this time my book Something Real began to take off. Topping off the charts at number three in chick-lit on the Wattpad rankings, I half felt as if I had finally made it. I was riding a bit of a high there for about two months as I continued to find time to write and somehow managed to finish off the first draft of the book. Thinking that this could turn into something more (pun intended) than just a Wattpad fad-book, I whipped together a manuscript and uploaded it to Swoon Reads in hopes of snagging a publishing deal. It was then that my good luck started to run out.

As a lot of you have heard, with all the typing I've done over the last four years (yes, four years) on my mobile, I got myself into quite the situation. Hearing that you have an 'overuse' injury to the tendons in your wrists caused by writing too much is never what an author wants to hear; let alone knowing that you'll need to space out times in between each chapter to give yourself a break. In the past, I've always been more of a binge writer (is that a thing?) to where I write nearly the whole book in one sitting. Now, having to give myself a break after writing no more than 500 words, I started to loose motivation.

One of the things that I don't think I was even able to comprehend up until this last week was just how much this injury has changed my day to day life. Though knowing that I can't write whenever I want to was a daunting thought, even doing things like the dishes or cleaning the bathroom left me clutching my wrists in pain. Nothing seems to work except excessive heating pad use and having my wrists braces strapped to my arms/hands at all times. At the moment, the tendon connected to my thumb on my left hand has bunched up just under my palm - it's about the size of my thumbprint. To the touch, i's a stabbing pain, and to others, it feels like someone's shoved a slightly mushy M+M under my skin.

And then there's the endometriosis.

For those of you girls/women that have come of age, we are all familiar with our time of the month. For those of you that are insanely well informed, you know that we won't have our periods forever. What's supposed to happen around our mid-forty's is an operation to remove all of those special parts that prepare for and those that make babies, thus stopping our month to month torture. In my family however, we are blessed with seeming progressive bodies that age far beyond what science can understand (sarcasm intended, as science does indeed understand). The women in my family have come to find out that fibroids can grow on or around our ovaries to the point where you're doubling over in pain for one week every month. Though my mother and two aunt's suffered from this between their late thirty's and early forty's, I am suffering from it now because I failed to start birth control soon enough. That daily pill has the ability to dull the symptoms and temporarily stop the growing of these fibroids until you either get pregnant, or have your ovaries removed. Luckily enough for me, it's starting to look like I'll be falling into the latter of those three categories. After some serious and very scarce conversations with my mother, we may be looking into getting my ovaries removed all together. Of course this means I won't be able to have children and that I'll have to start up on supplemental medication to replace estrogen, but at this point I wouldn't wish the kind of pain I've felt on my worst enemy.

I know this only touches the surface on my absence as of late (add on that my mother was diagnosed with bronchitis/pneumonia on Christmas Eve, and that my lovely sister Stevie is suffering through her second kidney stone at the moment), but I do hope this puts my lack of updates into perspective.

I will say this about 2017, I have made/kept some of the best friends I could ever ask for. Yes, you all know who you are (Stevie, Alice, Caroline, Sophi, Julia, Skye...).

But before I end this horror of a blog post, I will make a few promises to not only you all, but to myself:

• I hereby promise to try and write at least a chapter (of quite literally any story) a week.

• I promise to keep you all posted on my every-changing updating schedule.

• I promise to continue to change my covers despite the fact that they are all perfectly fine, as my graphic design skills are constantly changing and I do get extremely bored sometimes.

• I promise to keep re-blogging things on Tumblr that make no sense and to keep replying to everyone with only random GIF's on Twitter.

• I promise to never forget where I came from and to continue to commend my fellow Disney fanfic authors for reminding me of who I am.

• I promise to give you all the love and attention you deserve and finally comment back.

• I promise to ignore my social anxiety and finally PM everyone back and I AM SO SORRY FOR NOT DOING THAT!

I think that's it.

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