Here, In November 2020, there is one thing I want to memorialize, to remember. And that is how exhausted I am. Every day. Exhaustion.

Slept 10 hours?

Exhausted.

Slept 5 hours?

Exhausted.

Napped?

Exhausted.

Just, all the time. Exhausted.

I thought something was wrong with me. It’s more than the usual blahs associated with time change and the fact that it gets dark at the unholy hour of 5:30 p.m. Physically, I feel good. Better than I have probably in years thanks to a workout routine that’s stuck for once.

No, this is a mental fog. Fatigue. Disinterest. Though not a depression. I understand why one would be depressed in our current state. I think the difference is that I want to do things. I want to write. I want to plan. I want to take on complicated plots and ideas. I do.

But I carve out some time, sit down, and fight for the hundred words that I manage to squeeze out. Why is this so hard? I scream into the void. The void answers back.

“Please. Stop. I am so tired of the screaming.”

So I do mindless tasks. Clean my house. Shell pecans. Tasks for which the most difficult decision may be ‘is this wall clean enough?’

Why? Why can I easily spend 4 hours scrubbing walls and baseboard and floors on my hands and knees, but 15 minutes ta the keyboard seems endlessly draining? It used to be the other way around!

Then I saw a tweet last week and it’s been burning a hole in my brain since.

COVID fatigue is a real & we’re all exhausted, but I suspect a lot is actually *decision* fatigue.

The absence of clear rules, information, and guidance means having to think through our every action to decide what feels safest. Good leadership would give us all a break.

— Ellie Murray (@EpiEllie) November 21, 2020

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This is what I do all day, every day. I look at the calendar, examine the case spread in our county and then make decision after decision after decision about how to navigate this as safely as possible. All while living under the terror of not only the possibility of contracting COVID, but spreading it to my family, possibly dying or losing a family member. Add to that the horror that is our Federal Government right now?

And you may think, why on earth would she want to remember this? Wouldn’t she rather focus on the family togetherness? They close knit bonds of quarantining for 250+ days with her husband and kids?

Yeah. It’s been great. <rolls eyes>

NO! I’ve been turned into (by my local, state, and federal government) the arbiter of COVID safety for my family. They ask if they can do activities and I have to run through a barrage of questions and extract multitudes of promises and threats and reminders about the catastrophic consequences of not following through. Mr. Quinn and I have endlessly debated the minutia of every. little. thing. we. have. done. Everything!

I have had to disappoint my kids and my husband so much. I have spent sleepless night agonizing over decisions that wouldn’t have been given a second thought in the before times.

MY KID HAS HAD TO TAKE A GAP YEAR BECAUSE OF THIS MESS!

I am so tired. I just want someone else to make some decisions. I want someone, anyone, in authority to say that this is real and that these things are safe and these are not. I want to not be gaslit by my social media feeds full of pictures of friends and family gathering without me inside restaurants and weddings and births. I want to stop having to be the COVID arbiter.

I would much rather put that decision making energy into my characters instead of feeling like writing my own romantic fantasy which right now feels like it would be best described as a heroine that just floats from activity to activity with no decisions to be made. Ever.

Like most people would say, I think, this has been a rough season. Which I hope explains my extended absence. Generalized mild anxiety bloomed into a mostly controlled anxiety as the world seem to go to pieces around me. Lockdown, Shelter In Place, Daily case rates and how full is the ICU? Will it come here? It has. What happens next? Murder hornets.

All that to say, like most, I have been in full-on coping mode. I did puzzles and washed my hands way too much. I stressed about groceries and toilet paper and meat shortages. I doom scrolled social media. I started sewing again and made over 100 masks for a local charity and for family. I kept working out. I picked up working on my family history again. Anything to keep myself distracted. To keep the low-level anxiety at bay.

And now cases in Texas are spiking. But the garden is blooming and bearing fruit and I have masks and wear them anytime I am out and about. I still wash my hands but the cracking and bleeding has stopped. Mostly.

And I am back to trying to write again. In fits and starts I get words down, slowly.

I fill the bird feeders and bird bath and write a few words. I pick cucumbers and squash and write a few more words. I clean the kitchen and delete some words and reshape that sentence. And I fold laundry and watch Netflix and then write a few more words. Because sitting and focusing for hours just … isn’t happening right now. Not while the world is falling apart around me.

Okay, attempted healthy writer.

Health is a subject that gets more and more air time between me and Mr. Quinn as we age. We’re both in our early 40s and it’s getting easier to see the wear and tear on our older friends and Facebook follows. The grumping about drug prices and knee replacements and hip replacements, etc. It fills my feed.

Things got a little more urgent for me over the summer. Less so for him. He does Ironman distance races for fun and so has a resting heart rate in the 40s. Hmph.

I went for my yearly doctor visit and we talked all things middle age – perimenopause, gray hair, cholesterol, blood pressure, the list goes on and on. Add doctor anxiety and generalized anxiety and well…

The nurse had taken my blood pressure and asked if I was nervous. I was. And it showed in my numbers. And it freaked me out.

As a writer, I am (obviously) pretty sedentary, spending long hours in front of books and computers researching and writing. That, uh, wasn’t helping my situation. I decided to make a change and kind of mustered myself into a walking habit, but it was on again, off again and sometimes more off than on and no clear goal. In other words, I’m not sure it was doing me any good.

I mentioned it to Mr. Quinn knowing that I was stumbling into shark-infested waters. Health and fitness is a favorite subject of his. In the past, his answer has always been, “You should start running.”

I hate running.

But this time? This time he had a different answer. This time he suggested I start heart rate training. Then he sat down and an hour later I had a plan. Bonus! It didn’t involve running.

It works like this. I wear my Garmin watch (a hand-me-down from him) and a heart rate monitor. I walk. I keep my heart rate in a specific range. That’s it.

And it really is that simple.

I walk six days a week. Mondays are my rest day. Tuesdays and Thursdays are ‘endurance’ workouts. The goal is to keep my heart rate in my Zone 1 range. These are usually less than an hour. Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday are ‘recovery’ workouts. Heart rate in the recovery zone, moving the legs, getting the blood pumping. Usually half an hour or less (right now they last about 20 minutes – but they’ve been gradually getting longer).

Saturday long walks. Ten minutes of warm-up and a longer time in Zone 1. This past weekend the whole thing was 54 minutes. Eventually, I’ll be out for 2+ hours. But I’m working up to that.

When Mr. Quinn asked why I wanted to do this, was I training for a race? I had to admit no, I’m not. I don’t enjoy racing. Not even a little bit. But I do enjoy being alive and not being on long-term medications to keep me that way.

I’ve taken my health for granted for a very long time and the reality is that I shouldn’t. This wasn’t a New Years’ weight loss resolution. This is me wanting to get and stay healthy so I can keep writing and doing all of the other things that I love.

I’ve been at this now for three weeks. I just checked the data and the first real progress has been noted. My resting heart rate has dropped by 7 points on average. That’s huge.

In other notes, I feel better, I’ve been sleeping better (also proven by data), I feel less anxious*.

Gonna do my best to keep at this and see where it goes. I’ve got a great coach and an achievable plan, so I am hopeful. Planning on checking in here once a month or so with updates.

I would love to hear your get healthy stories too! It’s motivating!

*I feel less anxious. A lot of my anxiety was over the numbers I got from the doctor. Driven by guilt from bad choices I’ve made and hating my body. It wasn’t and hasn’t been an anxiety disorder. I am in no way advocating for treating true anxiety disorders with only exercise. Please, if you struggle with anxiety or depression, reach out. There are people that can help.

In all of the soul-searching last year I did finally discover a kind of pattern. I went back and forth between “But I love blogging,” and “But this writing makes no money,” and “But I can’t really write what I want to on my blog!”

Only one of those statements is true. I really do love blogging. I process through writing. It’s like talking with friends I can’t see. (That sounds really crazy as I read it back. Oh, well.)

The blog here may not actually directly make me any money (meaning it’s not monetized) and may not have yet sent someone searching for my books, but that’s not to say it will never happen, which brings me to the final point …

I’ve tried to really stay away from anything most would consider too polarizing on the blog here. Politics. Religion. Money. Sex. You know the drill. I followed the advice that talking about those things might lose me readers and as a baby author that wasn’t something I was willing to risk. I had barely found my feet and was really worried about offending people.

Well, I may still be a baby author (I have one book out at the moment and the second ready to launch soon!), but I. Am. Tired. 

Tired of not having a place to put all of my thoughts and journey.

Tired of not speaking up.

Tired of treading on eggshells around some seriously WTF stuff.

So here’s what’s up:

1. I’m not going to shy away from posting anything I please. All I ask from you is that you respect this as my space. I will not suffer ad hominem attacks. Discussion is good, even welcome. But this is my space and I will be sharing my journey for better or worse.
2. I will tag my entries. If it’s a subject that might rile you up and you can’t even, then feel free to walk away. I am not doing this to start a fight or bring stress to other people’s lives. I’ll try to post content warnings as applicable and please speak up if I miss something.
3. The goal is to post once a week or so. No set schedule, but weekly.

Cool?

Cool.

See you on the flip side.

Quinn

(I used to sign off as ‘Q’ but then discovered that there’s a conspiracy around that letter, rolled my eyes, and decided to use the full name. Because I definitely do not want those people hanging out here.)

The edits on The Star of Fire are nearly done. I’ve reached the point that requires the most heavy rewriting and while I agree with the feedback I am also dreading the work. My beta just pulled a couple of threads out of the story and now I have to reweave a new thread in there. It’s tiring work, but I also love it? IDK, I’m weird.

In non-writing news: Mr. Quinn is signed up and training for another Ironman distance race next year (May 2020) which means his trainer is coming back around again. I went out to say hi and ask about his new baby last time he was here. (Brief aside: The trainer is a couple of years older than us and has a child who is in college from his first marriage – so, yeah, starting over). Trainer gave me the standard baby update including milestones, etc. but then went on to explain that he’s taken on a new role as a Stay At Home Dad this go round. He works his schedule around his wife’s and stays with the baby during the day (“Man, I had no idea how exhausting that is!”)

“Yeah, baby’s wear you out!” I laughed.

“Okay, so right. She’s great, but man it’s a lot of work and I am so tired. Like, I reached out to my ex!” He paused to give the next set.

“Your ex?”

“Yeah, so last time I was young and so I wasn’t around so much and like I was working and stuff. I had no idea how much she was really doing to balance all of this.”

“Invisible labor’s a bitch, amirite?”

He laughed. “Is that what you call it?”

And yeah, that’s what it’s called. Nobody sees it, it just gets done. Thankfully Mr. Quinn isn’t so oblivious (he still misses things), but I also resolved recently to start asking for praise. Like when I manage the yard work. I explained what it would cost to have a yard crew come out and do the work and told him that if I continued to not feel the glow of appreciation for my contribution that I would be forced to pay someone else to do it.

Reader, I get taken out for lunch every time I mow the lawn because it’s far, far cheaper for him to treat me to lunch than to pay a crew to do my job. I also get at least 24 hours worth of praise for a job well done.

On that note, I will launch into a mini-rant on landscaping. When we put out pool in several years ago was the one and only time we hired a landscaper to do anything in our yard. It may also be the last.

We asked for pet-friendly (read: not poisonous to animals) plants that were also drought tolerant (we live in Texas) and for thought to be given to arrangement when plants were mature.

We got pet friendly (no poisonings yet).

We got drought tolerant (mostly).

But I can no longer get to my backyard spigot because the plants there have grown so thick that I need a machete to even find it. So much for thought to the mature plant size. I have to cut back the plants along the stepping stones to the workshop (that the landscaper installed! He knew we would have to walk there!) 5 or 6 times every summer just so we can see the path.

Sure the beds looked good from the start but the mature size of some of these plants is killing me! Also, I feel as though a big landscaping overhaul may be in my future and I don’t like it.

Anyway, that’s my world in a blog post.

Later Days,

Q

P.S. Does anyone remember the cartoon where the character said “Later Days” at the end of every episode. I vaguely recall watching it with my older kids. And it was about some gang of kids that skateboarded I think? IDK, but I always loved that sign-off.

May and June. Busy in their own rite, busier this year.

We wrapped up our school year in May – I’ll have a college Sophomore/Junior next year, a Senior in high school and a 6th grader next school year. How in the world did I get this old?!

That was a flurry of activity in itself. Then there was the beach trip (logistics on me) then a quick turn-around to life and then, then!

We left for two weeks in Scandinavia/Europe.

It was fun and educational and worth every bit of the time lost to planning and stress.

In the intervening weeks (days, hours, minutes, seconds) I was writing and editing.

Oh, also, my parents moved out and then we rearranged the whole house and also cleaned out the storage room, garage, and laundry room, and also finished two big projects in the shop.

It’s been a jam packed two months and I am ready to have some semblance of normalcy and schedule.

But not quite yet!

Tomorrow is my birthday and also the last weekend of June. I’ll be celebrating and assisting with tri workouts this weekend, but Monday?

Monday is for work and normalcy and schedule.

Every writing book I’ve read in the last few weeks has had one thing in common. Besides talking about writing.

They all have spent a fair amount of words on the importance of moving your body. And I get it. Writing is super sedentary. Literally nothing I do requires me to move. I could work in bed all day if I wanted.

That’s not a good thing. It sounds amazing, but it’s not good.

So, I signed up for a 5k in March. And I fired up the old Couch to 5k app again. It’s not my first time racing, and hopefully it won’t be my last. On a positive note, I didn’t hate running as much as I did before. Of course, I’ve been out exactly one time, so talk to me in a few weeks about how I’m feeling.

This time around I really want to pay attention to whether or not I feel more creative overall. That’s supposed to be a benefit of getting out and moving. I think last time I was so miserable the only creative boost I saw was in writing about food. Ha!

I won’t bore you with training details here, but will let you know how the 5k goes.

The funny thing about writing is that it, well, requires a LOT of writing. And that’s what I’ve been up to.

All that to say, I hope you have a very Merry Holiday season. I have some posts planned for the new year and will see you then!