I haven’t been able to figure out where to start with this one, so I’m just diving in headfirst and hoping I come up for air sometime.
This year has been a difficult year. It’s been a “growing in the cracks in the concrete” kind of a year, of stretching and growing and living through all the things you think will break you. It’s been a year of great successes, great achievements, and great losses and sorrows.
I’ve lost count of how many critical incidents we’ve responded to over the last year. Between the work and the personal losses and everything else, I’ve been just trying to keep from drowning.
A few weeks ago a phrase popped into my heart and eventually made its way up to my head: ‘let the light in’.
If I am a dandelion growing through a crack in the concrete, at least I can choose to grow up tall and to let the light in.
Back at the end of May I wrote another blog post and tried to pick up the threads here for my author page, but life came in with another curve ball. At the beginning of the summer, my husband made the difficult decision to step away from public safety. After being in the fire service and public safety for most of his adult life, it’s left him with wounds that need time and grace to heal. I am more proud than I can ever express that he recognized what he needed and that he made the best decision he could for himself and for our family.
While it was the right decision, at the same time it’s left us in a difficult position financially. Rising costs of fuel and utilities, costs of groceries, and increased medical bills because I’ve had two miscarriages this year have all piled up on top of the reduced income. While he’s trying to find work, I’ve been picking up extra shifts and extra hours while still trying to maintain some kind of work-life balance.
As a result my writing has suffered. Lately we’ve been discussing the future of my writing, and we’ve made several decisions.
The biggest roadblock I face currently with my writing is that there is a nearly insurmountable amount of administrative work that needs to be done as well. Archiving old social media posts onto my website, managing book sales and my Butterfly Mail, managing and moderating comments, answering messages, responding to comments, tracking inventory and expenses, staying on top of paperwork… it’s like a thousand little sticky notes on the desktop of my brain that get in the way of my actual writing.
What we’ve decided to try is to have Chris handle more of the administrative side of things, allowing me to devote more of my time to the writing that I love so much. This will also allow him to utilize his graphic design and photography skills.
This is a new adventure for us and I’m so excited to have him step up and take on this new role.
Here’s what you can expect:
- Much better consistency with Butterfly Mail
- More essays
- More videos of Maine and all the places we love
- More books
- More tee-shirts and artwork
- Maybe even more of the human interest stories I loved writing when I worked at the paper
We’re still chipping away at things at home. I’m still working between 40 and 60 hours a week, but for the sake of my mental and physical health and my marriage I’m not doing the 80+ hours I did all winter. He’s still looking for work locally. We’re still volunteering in a few different ways including with Orion, my therapy dog. We’re both navigating the rocky waves of traumatic stress and critical incidents. And we’re being careful and intentional about making time for ourselves as individuals and as a couple.
So with all of that said:
You’re going to see some changes slow-rolled out across my website and social media accounts over the next few weeks. Things that will stay the same:
- Entirely and authentically human. No AI has been or will be used in my work.
- We’ll still read every single comment and message and email and card. I have read every comment since I started publishing my writing more than a decade ago and I don’t plan to stop.
- Hope, joy, and love. These three things have been at the core of everything for my entire life. Hope, joy, and love are the best tools I bring to my work in public safety, to my communities, and to you; even when life gets hard, as it has this year, these three things are still at the heart of everything I do.
I’m so thankful for this community we have here. I hope you’ll stick around.
Love you, mean it.
-A&C
