Everything is changing.

My house and yard are clean, so I feel happier every day. They are clean because I can pay someone to make them that way. I can pay someone because my writing is selling, as soon as I can type it. And the more my writing sells the more opportunities come to me. My life is fuller and sweeter than ever before. My dearest dream is set upon the loom, and each day is another line of tapestry woven into place.

I’m so uncomfortable. And I know I have nerve to complain. I hate myself for being uncomfortable, but  I am.

I have always been helpless. A sidekick. The petulant pet cat. The helpless complainer who tried to make her complaining funny. The little sister. My entire life. It’s all that I know. I embraced that designation. It meant I didn’t have to do the hard stuff.

And as for being a writer. There is so much relief in giving up your dream. Of coming to your senses in your early 30’s and realizing maintaining a grown-up life of paid bills and functioning kids is quite enough of a challenge. That 95 percent of 20 year olds want to be rock stars, writers, actors, artists, professors, surgeons and entrepreneurs; those handful of jobs that have prestige and excitement and fulfillment all together, and that only .001 of them get to there. And usually luck has a lot to do with it.

Dreams are for people in their 20’s, same as radical political views and having no concept that you will die. Then you grow up and need to channel your energy elsewhere. But then lightening struck the ground at my feet and the electric charge made me a mutant. Lazy and miserable and hardworking and happy, all swirling together like star stuff inside me.

I’m being ripped out of a cocoon I wasn’t finished with yet. I’ve come out damp and undeveloped, only able to fly in shaky, sputtering loops. And I don’t know where I’m going.

I don’t quite know how to be this new woman, who is racking up all the things she hated herself for not having before. I’d just gotten used to the old way.

I’m still not going on a diet. Take THAT, new reality so bright it burns.