Ever been there?
Trying your damndest to learn something new, not quite sure if you’re doing it right.
I find myself in that place where hip and square collide.
I like to think of myself as young (as most people my age do). Not old. Stuck somewhere in the middle. Inside the life preserver yet bobbing in the deep end of the pool.
Far from a feckless Gen Z (sorry kids), a rung down from a hopeless boomer (sorry parents). Not as woke as most of my millennial friends?
Still…
I consider myself empathetic. Culturally aware. Sensitive (and insensitive) depending on the day. Floundering in a place where I don’t fit in.
I never liked boxes.
I never like puzzling my family though I often do. “You’re what we call interesting.”
A lefty in a righty world.
I merely want all the words in the right place. A story.
To tell them.
To hear them.
To stew them and chew them and sleep them and dream them and breathe them and build them—deconstruct them—which forces my husband to say “you’re still at it"?” to which I look up from the screen with a feckless smile, hopeless in my pursuits, determined to write the next great American novel capturing every voice every experience every struggle that’s both universal and uniquely American represented in 300 pages or 95,000 words that an agent can sell and a publisher will publish and a reader will buy so all parties turn a profit without anyone wasting a penny on ink that doesn’t say anything.
Not really.
But no one can do that.
Not really.
I’m curious what a “woman my age” has to say and who cares to listen. Not about face creams or hair growth supplements. Semaglutide and hormone replacement.
About life. Ups and downs. Ins and outs. Highs and lows. Cliches. Never ending, self-perpetuating human cliches.
Exploring what it means to be alive. Not as a gender. Or belonging to a generation, a movement, an era. Just as a person. Looking at what it means to be a person. Through a female lens (because let’s be honest, we all have bias).
I don’t know what I’m doing. Exactly.
But I try.
Try with me.