Word Press Anniversary

Apparently, today is my sixth anniversary as a WordPress user, which seems as good an excuse as any to finally break out of my virtual hermitage and write an update post.

So, where have I been? What have I been up to? How am I doing? All good questions. I even have answers to them.

So, Where Have I Been?

Here. There. Elsewhere.

Between my December post and my April post, I flew from Australia back to the US, acquired a new visa, helped my grandparents move, flew back to Australia, recovered from jetlag for a month, flew to New Zealand for a North Island road trip with my parents, and returned to Australia.

So, I guess I’ve mostly been in Australia. In Perth. In our rented house. Sitting at my computer writing stories about people who aren’t real, in places that exist only in my head, my favorite place.

What Have I Been Up To?

The easy answer is, I’ve been writing.

Is anyone really surprised? But I’ve also been applying for jobs in Australia, querying my book, reading, listening to podcasts (I did write a blog post a couple months back about the podcasts I’ve been into lately, but then my computer restarted and I lost the lion’s share of my work on that and I’ve been too lazy to go back and write it again. Who knows, I may actually get to that post eventually), revising two other books, writing short stories and poems, and sewing.

“Sewing?” You ask. “I didn’t know you could sew.” (This is assuming that you don’t follow me on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, in which case you’re probably aware of that fact by now). The truth is, sewing is a new hobby for me. I’ve wanted to sew pretty much all my life. More than that, I’ve wanted to make clothes, not just any clothes, but clothes that I’ve designed. My mother says that I started drawing dresses before I drew people and all through school, the margins of my notebooks were filled with doodles of dresses and jackets and armor and sharp pantsuits. I even took a Fashion business course as an elective in my Sophmore year of High School. But for reasons that I don’t really feel like unpacking right now, I never did sit down at a sewing machine and try.

Those reasons for not trying mostly boil down to fear, which I’ve been working on confronting in myself over the last few years. So, last year I sat down and wrote out a list of things I wanted to try and top of that list was “Make a dress” since dresses are my weakness and my greatest love outside of poodles, Godzilla, and mac-and-cheese. In July or August of last year, I went to Jo-Anne fabrics with and bought some patterns and fabric and then promptly left them in the bag for six months while I worried about making mistakes and being bad at a thing I wanted to be good at and being really busy with other things and being in Australia. And then, when I got home to Maine, I decided not to write during the three months I was home and instead work on learning to sew in addition to aforementioned helping the grandparents move.

The first thing I made was a sweatshirt out of an adorable kids’ pajama fabric. And it didn’t suck. Sure, it wasn’t perfect, but I made a functional piece of clothing that fit me.

Then I made a blouse with dramatic sleeves.

And then I looked at the sweatshirt pattern and the sleeves from the blouse and said, “Hey, what if I put those sleeves on a sweatshirt?” And thus, my new favorite item of clothing was born and I’d achieved my goal of semi-designing an item of clothing.

And then, I decided to try making pants and put that off so long that on the day I was set to catch the bus down to Boston to catch my plane to LA to catch my flight to Melbourne to hop across another continent to Perth, I woke up at 3:00 am to finish hand sewing the hook and eye onto the waistband.

Once, I landed in Perth, with a suitcase full of patterns, I borrowed my person’s mother’s sewing machine, dug through her fabric collection and continued the work of pursuing this new awesome skill-set with a goal towards creating a garment of my own design, using my own pattern. I’m not there yet. I’m still in the phase of taking elements from existing patterns and figuring out how to mash them together to make something close to a sketch I’ve done.

But I’ve honestly slowed down on the sewing a bit, using it as a break from writing and stress-sweating about the lack of responses to my many job applications (honestly this could be its own blog post, but I’m not going to go there).

And I think that pretty much sums up what I’ve been up to, although I guess I’ve also been up to being completely stumped about how public transportation works. This is totally a symptom of having grown up in rural areas where there is no public transit and not because Perth public transit doesn’t make sense. I’m sure it does make sense, I just don’t get it, and I haven’t taken the time to talk to my anxiety about why I haven’t taken the time to bridge that knowledge gap, (but again, that could be its own blog post).

How I am Doing?

Short answer: better.

Slightly longer answer: better, but it’s a day-by-day, week-by-week sort of thing.

But let’s define better, shall we? What exactly are we doing better than, hmm? Give us some context, Emily.

Okay, context. The first two times I came to Australia were really hard on me mentally and emotionally. Both of those trips were limited to three months in the country, which severely restricted my desire to invest in actually being in the country and establishing any kind of roots or connections or stability because that takes WORK and I’m LAZY. I spent the vast majority of my time in my house on the computer or at the park behind my house stalking waterfowl with my camera.

I didn’t explore. I didn’t take action to invest myself in the place I was in and that left me in a very unhappy place (mentally speaking, I’m sure Perth is quite happy with itself overall).

When I went back to Maine in January, it occurred to me, that my unhappiness was largely a symptom of feeling out of control of my life circumstances which is a thing that has always made me deeply unhappy. The biggest fights I had with my parents as a child were largely centered around me being upset about my lack of control. I don’t think that’s uncommon, actually, but realizing the root of my unhappiness gave me the opportunity to take steps towards happiness.

I told myself to stop being an observer, a side character if you will, and start being the protagonist in my own story, which can be really hard when you’re naturally lazy and inclined towards wanting to let other people do the things while you just watch them and write characters based on them.

So, I made a list of things I could do to take control of certain aspects of my life: like finding a job, exploring opportunities to be more social, finding an upright bass to play while I’m in Australia because I’d previously diagnosed that playing music is an important part of my overall well-being. I wrote that list out on a large piece of paper, in pen, with boxes next to each item where I could give myself a star sticker for having done that thing. I titled that list “The Big Girl List” because my goal in life is to be twelve-years-old forever. And then I pinned that list to the corkboard next to my computer so that every day I have to stare at all the empty boxes that should be filling with stars and that I have the power to fill with stars if only I start being the main character (why am I so motivated by stickers? This is an aspect of my personality that I truly do not understand and only seems to get stronger the older I get).

And forcing myself to be not just the main character in my life but the protagonist (and there is a difference as deftly pointed out in this episode of my favorite writing podcast whose tagline I have tattooed on my body because I just love it so much and also it’s just a good daily reminder), has made me happier, because I’m in control and if I’m not happy, it’s not because of the place I’m in or the people surrounding me, but because I’ve chosen not to do something which means I can take the opposite action and choose to do something.

I’m still working on this new-fangled protagging thing, some days are better than others. Some days I just want to become one with my sofa and never emerge again, some days, my anxiety locks me inside my own head and I don’t have the energy to engage with it and the rest of the world at the same time, and some days are just the boring bits that the narrative skips over and that’s okay because, for the most part, I’m better.

Thank you for reading.