This Demented Life: A Flash Blog

It’s a safe bet that everything I’ve written over the years—the unfinished novels, the journals and sketches, the essays and poems and stories, published or not—will never be showcased in an academic library.

And although I am compelled to preserve decades of writing—necessary proof that, yes, I am a writer—I’m at a loss. Four generations of writers in the family and the legacy ends with me. Who am I doing this for? Why do I write? And how do I smash the selfish quest for recognition? How do I balance humility with purpose?

After a couple of sober decades, I’ve learned a little about humility and ego. These days, I’d much rather write under the radar than promote my work. Write as if I’m the only one reading it. Write for the enjoyment of putting words on a page.

And even when it feels as if writing futures are inked in cyberspace and the persistent pivot to new platforms is a prerequisite to a writer’s evolution, I write. For myself. For hope. For strength. I write because every person, every place, every moment holds a story and I am simply the storytelling conduit.

So I continue to create artifacts for a future era, borne from an endless stream of joy and agony—digital archives and notebooks in a dusty attic hope chest along with my mother’s sketchbooks. My grandmother’s onionskin manuscripts. The drawings for a Hemingway novel my father’s father illustrated. My words, the offspring of an otherwise barren womb, perpetuate the family writing legacy. Giving meaning to life. Giving life meaning.

And if my words help another writer questioning their own purpose, then for me, humble writing is the purpose.

Numbers aren’t my thing. In school, math came slowly, as elusive as spring in February. Each lightbulb moment—grasping Pythagorean theory, solving a quadratic equation—felt worthy of its own holiday.

Words, though. I’ve always been a fan.

Freshman year in college, I switched majors with alarming frequency, first studying law then linguistics then journalism. Somewhere along the line I was forced into two semesters of economics: macro and micro. It was the only class I got a “D” in and I hated it energetically. Eighteen years, two husbands, three states and a foreign country later, I graduated with a bachelors in English.

And inexplicably, a 25-year career in insurance. For someone not particularly fond of numbers, it was an interesting galaxy to orbit, that universe of actuarial tables, rate-setting, production goals and budgets. Living the writer’s life my eight-year-old self once dreamily envisioned was as distant as Pluto.

After relinquishing the spreadsheets to the home office cubicle farm a few years ago, I returned home to care for my mom with Alzheimer’s. I returned to writing too, and slowly, handwritten words transformed into a flash blog. Later, a novella written entirely in tweets. Flash fiction, haiku and microessays published in lit journals.

This year, I launched a new writing project, the micro mashup, a weekly microburst of restless words.

And now I get it. How numbers and words collaborate in their own economies of scale. How, when I write with fewer words, my production level increases. How, so often, less is more.

Ahhh…the last week of the year. That magic retrospective space for relaxing and recharging. And yet, the contradictory messages tossed about like confetti: Set intentions, create goals, make resolutions, plan for a New Year.

We plan for the future because the calendar—and employers, influencers, peers and life coaches, even our own overachieving selves—tell us we should.

Fail to plan, plan to fail: This was how I rolled for 25 years in my old life as a corporate sales VP, where 5-Year Business Plans and SMART goals fueled the last gasp of year-end planning.

But in these past six years of family caregiving, overlaid with a relentless pandemic, planning and goal setting feel beyond difficult, too vast. “Everything is just too big,” my mother used to say when she was writing on deadline.

Same.

So instead, I keep a mental list of what my former boss called the “Nice To Do’s,” those agenda items that never quite get done: Celebrate our 20^th wedding anniversary in Hawaii; move home to Maine permanently; get a part-time job at the island general store. But it’s a little tough with two old guys in my life, especially one pushing 90 with a fractured hip, and I’m still mourning my mother’s passing earlier this year.

Watching the future collide with itself, as unreachable as the stars, yet close as a breath.

And once again, I embrace the unplanned, revel in the unfinished and celebrate the unresolved.

PS: If you can’t imagine a new year without plans and goals, here’s a detailed workbook shared by an Insta writing friend. Fair warning, it’s work.