Where She Rambles On

Alright, self, the past year hasn't been too kind.

Neither was the year before that, or the one before that, or the past decade, really, now that we think about it. It's been worse for other people, a lot worse, but I've still had a pretty lousy go of late.

That changes this year! This year is gonna be fantastic! This year is gonna rock!

Right?

Look, it's been 9 years since we moved back home. It's been 7 years since we had a job that didn't make us want to die. The casino job gave us the worst anxiety we’ve ever had, the call center job made us hate living, the last data entry job only lasted three months and the most recent job is... well, it's not bad, but it's still working for someone else.

Working for other people hasn’t been particularly worthwhile, has it? We wind up with a lot more stress than what’s worthwhile, or it ends up being a short-term venture. Can’t get out of a rut when your only form of income lasts three months, y’know.

There is one constant.

We keep getting back into the thrifting business... and getting out of it, and going back to it.

Y'know, maybe that's kind of a hint. Maybe that's where we belong: sorting through other peoples’ stuff and selling off the treasure.

Maybe this is the year we say "forget it" to trying to work for other people and just work for ourselves. We've got the knowledge! The questionable grammar! The... well, not the moxie or the drive, but we can pretend. We've pretended to have the drive in literally everything else we've done. We're good at pretending.

That's how we've survived for so long!

Self, we could make this our year, you and me. Finish our website. Make it pretty. Put our office together the way it needs to be instead of being the disaster that it is. Get all our digital treasures up on Etsy. Scream. Flail. Cry. We could do it all!

Punch depression in the face. Okay, admittedly that’s a bit of a stretch -- depression doesn’t have a face, and if it did it would probably be rude to punch it. It won’t continue to wreck our lives this year, though. We’ll get it under control. We’ll get everything under control.

We’ll have some semblance of our health again, somehow.

Maybe, with a little luck, we’ll get back into writing. It’s been far too long since we last spent more than ten minutes on a project, or had any projects to speak of. It’ll be nice to pump out a little eBook, or get our blog going. It’ll be lovely to entertain people with our fanfiction again. People actually like our work, self. They like reading what we have to say. That shouldn’t be any writer’s driving force, but we’ve always been natural performers. It’s just how we are, and we’ve been denying ourselves that outlet for so long.

Besides, writing announcement e-mails isn’t our idea of a good time.

We could do something we enjoy, we could work with all the old stuff we like and share our knowledge on that stuff and make a living out of it. We could teach people things! Useful things! Interesting things! Things they might pay us to teach them or to read about.

Maybe we could make enough to fully pay all our debts. Make enough for our first apartment in ten years. Wouldn't that be wonderful? To be debt-free for the first time in years would be amazing.

2021 could be our year, self.

No. No ‘could be’ about it. 2021 will be our year. We are going to get better, do better, and be better.

Let’s make it happen.