Murdery.
“Yeah, I know I want to do more. I just have no idea how to make that sh*t happen.”
Let me paint you a picture of the f*ckery that has been my week, and maybe it’s been yours too.It’s a Wednesday. Or maybe a Thursday. It feels like a Tuesday (because I’m behind and want it to be) that thinks it’s a Friday but is actually a Wednesday. Do you catch that? No? Me either, it’s okay. I’m doing approximately eleven things at once. There is a knee pad missing. There is a child who has not eaten (again). There is a friend who can’t have dairy in your house, and together they are yelling something about CoCo Chanel — not the fashion house, just the name, in the pitch of two unhinged middle-schoolers — while banging a volleyball against a wall you recently repainted. Bloody hell I cannot even hear myself think.
I have thirty minutes until youth group. My expensive eyeliner is currently being used to draw fake beards on the faces of said middle school a**holes. And I have a client project open in one tab and am comparing hex codes to Amazon options in another because my current comforter has started making me murdery — something about the shade of it, I can’t explain it, it just makes me angry — and I need a waffle-textured duvet in a green that does not yet have a name but I will know it when I see it.
Oh, and I’m finishing this book. Which is why I’m here writing this blog.
I’m fine. I’m f*cking fine.
Us ladies are GD superheroes. We give, and we give, and then we give the shirt off our backs. And when we actually do take off said shirts, the men around us get blank faces, chuckle in a Beavis & Butt-Head way, say “nice titties” and miss entirely that we’ve been running on caffeine, nicotine (God I wish I still smoked), willpower and stubbornness since approximately 2019.
Gals, we prioritize ourselves — we really do try — right up until the house is a mess that we have to clean because it gives us the ick, or our husband gives us the “come hither” look, or someone needs something in the next thirty minutes and the entire sh*tshow hinges on YOU knowing where a single knee pad is located in a house that you also run.
And somewhere underneath all of that noise — underneath the volleyball and the eyeliner and the comforter that is now Judas — there is a woman with a longing for more that she doesn’t talk about out loud anyway.
That’s who I’ve been writing to.
This realization that I am this woman, you are this woman, and we all crave more opened up and got visceral this week in the best possible way.
D and M (let’s call them that in case they don’t want to feel targeted) are not fictional composites I invented in a positioning exercise. They are actual badass women I talked to this week. Real conversations. Real ladies standing at the door of their own lives, key in hand, knocking and telling themselves they want different and better “one day” — they just don’t know what that looks like or how they’ll get there.
D is younger than our ideal reader, but she’s already in it — the dream she keeps talking about, the passion she can name but hasn’t claimed yet. M is full-on still in the cage. Working a career that has served her well, paid her well, and given her everything she thought she wanted.
And still. That hum. That question she keeps not finishing the sentence about.
When I asked what would prove she was still lying to herself, the answer came fast:
“Yeah, I know I want to do more. I just have no idea how to make that sh*t happen.”
That sentence is the whole book. That woman is who I wrote it for. And she is everywhere.
I don’t know her name, but the bitch shows up everywhere. Sometimes she’s the one next to me at Starbucks, feral in a flannel, rage-typing through scope creep. Sometimes she’s the one who cleans the house at 11pm just to feel like she has control of something. Sometimes she’s you, reading this right now, silently saying “yeah, same.”
The book is almost done. And somehow, finding D and M in real life this week made it more real than any word count milestone ever could.
More soon. We’re close.
MANUSCRIPT UPDATE
✅ 19 chapters. Check.
✅ 55,323 words. Check.
🔄 Phase 2 underway: 3-pass ideal reader and marketing edit. In progress.
👀 Then: the hunt for agents and all the publishing sh*t I know nothing about yet.
