October-ish

October is here. Oc.to.ber. Also known as The Month of Pumpkin Everything.

It's crazy how fast life is moving these days. It seems like just last week I was just prepping the deck and yard for summer, and now it's time to put everything away to bundle up for another winter on the prairie.

The leaves are slowly changing color, slowly falling from the trees. Soon this will pick up the pace, one day the trees will be clothed in beautiful yellow, orange and dusky red, and then the next they'll be bare, exposed branches. We've had unseasonably warm weather here, and I've been enjoying it. I've spent more time in my yard during September and (so far) October than I did all of the summer.



I'm still struggling with This Girl. She creeps in when I least expect it, I can only turn myself inwards, breathe, and try not to hurt anyone with my broken pieces. I am not healing, I am not fighting back, I am only surviving at this point.


Anxiety has been killing me since August. Every day I seemed to be wound up in knots, my thoughts and emotions like fallen leaves blowing across the yard. Whirling around and around with no destination. I'm working on getting rid of this anxiety, but sometimes setting up the boundaries and saying no umpteen million times creates a lot of short term anxiety itself. Most of my anxiety is caused by other people thinking I'm available at the drop of a hat or not respecting my time. I'm over it. I need my life back. I need to enjoy these things that I'm doing.


I have several goals through October.

1. Continue managing my anxiety (or if not managing it at least being cognizant to recognize when anxiety could influence my behavior and gracefully excusing myself to a better place), boundaries, and keeping my to do list proportional to reality.
2. Read three books. I seriously let the TBR list get out of control this year. Three books really isn't going to make much of a dent in that stack, but it will make me feel better about goal #3.
3. Finish prepping for NaNoWriMo. This year I am not reading in November. I am consciously choosing to not read. This hasn't happened in a decade. I have always had a book started, a book I'm struggling through, or a book that I'm blatantly ignoring in favor of Netflix. I am not reading in November. Instead I'm going to really do NaNoWriMo. No more of this moaning about never finishing my manuscript. It's getting done. I'm going to take all that stuff that I struggled to learn in my college class and put it to work in October so I can sit down and just write. Write and finish.

I have a few other small goals around the house, but they're just "blah blah blah". Little projects that once I sit down and do them I can easily knock out in an hour here and there.


October is going to be a month of renewal for me, I can feel it.