Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
If you’re reading this, then I suspect you may be glued to your iphone or ipad or other internet-connected device, avoiding uncomfortable political confrontations with your families.
- You’re welcome. 2. I am not going there. 3. You’re welcome, again.
In keeping with my blog-post refrain, I’ve been meaning to write this for a while: I wrote (published through the good folks at Mason Jar Press) a new book titled Notes From My Phone* .
To my generous publisher’s dismay, I keep finding reasons to put this post off. As I continue to move the date further and further back and my excuses get less and less plausible, their responses have gone from
“okay, cool!”
to “yeah, okay”
to “okay…”
to “okay, is there something we can help with?”
to “okay, we do think this is pretty important, Michelle…”
Finally this week, over bacon, eggs, and a kind of vegetable I’d never had before (but adored) I confessed: I’m freaking myself out. I’m overthinking it. I’m avoiding it—no idea why—but Thanksgiving provides a nice opportunity, right?
A nod in response and quick move to next item on the publicity list. Inside my own head, I added it to my long list of overdue projects: I will do this. No excuses. Thanksgiving.
So listen. Because I’m out of excuses, and I need to tell you all something.
I wrote a new book, and I think you should read it.
I’m telling you—I’ve now told you. And it’s almost here. Like less-than-two-weeks-away almost here. I’m excited…
But also, if I’m being honest, I’m a little nervous.
It’s a book written by accident. You weren’t meant to read it, but now I’m asking you to. It’s a weird thing, y’all.
If a Facebook feed is someone’s “highlight reel” as I’ve heard it called, then Notes From My Phone* is a book full of the parts that were edited out.
It’s the doubts. The anger. The bad days. The shopping lists. The half-written, half-not-yet-processed poems from the margins of my life. So much so, that at times, I want to tell past me to “shake it off already,” and maybe you will, too.
But there’s something else there, that I can’t take credit for, because again I didn’t really mean to write it. And that’s my favorite part—that’s the reason I feel comfortable finally clicking “post” and asking you to read my words once again.
There’s something about looking at my life, almost from the distance of a stranger, that brings forth a gratefulness and beauty through the mundane, the sometimes-sharp edges, and unplanned (or planned and hopelessly “wrecked”) days of my life.
And that’s why—especially at a time when we’re fascinated with each of our own highlight reels (myself the worst of them all)—I think you should read Notes From My Phone*.
Plus, there’s a mouse in it.
So enough about that—Mason Jar, we good? (Kidding, you guys are amazing.)
I hope you each had a warm Thanksgiving, and no matter what the dinner conversation was about, I hope at the end of the day you’re thankful for the ones you’re with. It’s a horrible thing to get too caught up in being “right” (and believe me, I know this battle well. I think I’m right 104% of the time which I think says everything you need to know about that…).
May the rest of your holiday seasons be filled with the beauty and joy that lives in the unedited, sometimes messy versions of your lives.
___
Notes From My Phone* a self portrait in her twenties will be available Dec. 6.
You can purchase at the book release at Bird in Hand or online via Mason Jar Press (preferred for online sales) or Amazon.
You can help us spread the word by using the hashtag #NotesFromMyPhone on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. (Or, if you don’t want a hashtag is, you can simply tell all your friends.) More details to come.
