What Do You Want to Hear More About?

I haven’t slept through the night in over a month.

Somehow I’m sitting here ok with this. In high school, I slept like a rock. I had no idea at the time that this was largely because my parents had raised me in a community so quiet, on a street so pleasant, that there was little reason not to sleep late into the weekend mornings, then nap again in the afternoon. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night, look at my CD player/alarm clock. I’d see that it was 3am. I’d think, ‘Oh, how wonderful to have so many more hours to be here in this perfectly warm, perfectly comfortable bed.

I used to go to church on Sunday mornings, and when a Sunday school teacher would ask us to share our highs and lows of the week, I often started with something like, “I had the best nap yesterday. 10 out of 10.” Cheeky. But true.

In contrast, as an adult in 2022, I have lived through a pandemic with all of you, lived minutes away from the epicenter of a national uprising against racism and lethal injustice, and raised two tiny babies through those years of upheaval. Sleep anxiety is a way of life for me now. Add to that a national spike in respiratory illnesses in the past few weeks that has delivered to our home three waves of cold viruses. So, in the last month, every night I have either been up with sick kids or up all night coughing.

Wow… this is getting grim. I’m sharing this now, partly because I’m a little befuddled that I could sit here writing this to you with such high spirits. I’ve learned to live with sleep anxiety and fatigue. I have my little and large remedies (hello, NASA endorsed power naps!). I have a great therapist. I have a family that grounds me so deeply in gratitude that just listening to them now as my husband gives our kids a bath sends me so high I feel like jumping to the moon.

And the book. The book has been the biggest challenge, the sweetest reward, the steady way forward all year. There are highs and lows, but each time I sit down to write I am carried by a purpose that feels beyond me. And isn’t it? Because you’ll read it, right? And you are beyond me. And you might share it with someone. Or someone will find it at a bookstore and take it home and the story of the two years that most changed my life will belong to someone else, someone like you who will hold that story, let it mix with theirs like the spices in a perfect mulled cider, to be sipped together, a nourishing, luxurious, simple moment.

And so, I write.

Which brings me to a question for you. I’m writing here because I want to connect with you about the kinds of things we both care about. I have some things I’d love to share with you, but I’d love to know what you want to hear more of. What do you wish you knew more about?

Below is a short survey about the kinds of things I could share about my book, my journey writing the book, and more. Would you take a minute to fill it out? I’ll be reading your answers and writing responses back to you in the form of blogs, Instagram stories… honestly I’ll share this stuff wherever you are. Which, since you’re reading this, will mostly be here on the blog. Thank you for your time. I truly look forward to sharing more as the book gets written, published and sent into your hands.