It’s Wednesday and I’m Twerking

Because it feels good.

It‘s dark and rainy here in the Philly suburbs and it has been most of the day. Wednesday is also the day I have designated to write about grief.

So of course I am feeling buoyant instead of grief-stricken.

Damn PDA. (“Pathological Demand Avoidance”/Pervasive Demand for Autonomy.)

Whatever you want to call it, I have it BAD.

Much sympathy to anyone who has ever tried to manage me before. I sure don’t make it easy by often doing the opposite of what I’m told. If it makes you feel any better, I am just as hard for myself to manage.

This is why I am good at managing a wide range of people. Because I am a wide range of people. 😂

Really, I am good at managing people because I have been managing very challenging people much of my life. People who hate being told what to do and often do the opposite. This is why I used to have a newspaper cartoon taped to my monitor (how ancient am I?!?) reminding me that “Editing writers is like herding cats.”

Straight-up truth. Writers are hard to work with!! So are cats! And I have done it my whole damn life. And then I became a hard-to-work with writer myself. Because we are mirroring creatures and I have surrounded myself with writers for a very long time.

I am drawn toward writers and others with PDA.

Writers do not enjoy being told what to do. Writers have PDA big time.

Why I’m Twerking

I am recommitting to more movement as the sun begins to come back to me more. Wish I never got away, but as a solar-powered creature, I have less power in the winter. So I move less and don’t feel as good.

Making spring my favorite season of all. Rebirth and bloom. Bring it!!! I come to life with the plants around me. Because I am part of nature, not distinct from it.

I am also part cat. Resultant from playing an active role in raising 37 so far. Cats you know from birth are much easier to herd, FYI. Thirty kittens were born on my watch, and I have raised 32 from their day of birth. (Well, their mamas raised them, but I paid EXTREMELY close attention and mimicked mama’s behavior.)

Surely this is what made me think I could be an editor.

And still I have grown so comfortable being a writer instead of an editor—a cat instead of a human trying to herd them—I have put off returning to editing for YEARS.

But I have officially begun the process of compiling all my writing from the past six years into Scrivener to help me start to edit. I bought the damn program five years ago. No use crying over lost time. Too much catch up to do.

Today I am attempting to compile everything I have written on March 5th for the last six years. (Okay, I want to do 10 years but I’m starting with six to not overwhelm myself.)

As part of this effort, I am training myself to copy everything new I write into Scrivener daily as I write it.

So far I’m at 3,590 words today. Not including these words. I’m also at 18,319 steps. Because I write while I walk. So the more I write, the more I walk.

Also then I put on go-go as I’m writing while walking and soon find myself writing while twerking.

Writing while twerking might be my new favorite past time. Two things that make me feel good and relieve pain simultaneously, done in tandem. Highly recommend.

Sometimes I write about grief in this newsletter. And I do think about grief every single Wednesday. But sometimes I write about how I overcome grief.

Writing while twerking is amazingly effective.

I triple-dog dare you to try. LMK how it goes.

Also, if you’re wrestling with grief, I invite you to attend my monthly Grief Writing Workshop. It takes place on the third Wednesday of each month at noon EST on Zoom and is free to paid subscribers to Good Grief. I hope you’ll join me. Twerking while writing is not required, but may be encouraged.