Tish Black

I’m lying on my stomach on a floating dock on a river. It’s a cool October day but the sunshine and my fisherman’s sweater are keeping me warm.

Mom’s rules made it clear; girls were for friends, boys were for… something else.

I did something very adult this week. My biggest adult milestone and probably my last. (Only millionaires can afford mortgages.) I got my first car! Technically, I leased my first ‘compact crossover SUV’.

I’m trying to make friends. What an interesting phrase we use for that. I’m not making them from scratch, they’re already there, people, so what I am trying to do is create, or change, my relationship with them into something we’d call a friend.

I have a plan! Will I stick to it? Stay tuned!

You don’t get to be jealous of someone getting a job that you didn’t even apply for.

The list of things I can do is much smaller these days, so I gotta pay attention to every small, seemingly inconsequential thing I can do by choice. Gotta focus on the haves, not the have-nots.

Not sure how I feel about being back on YouTube again. Like, am I trying to be a “YouTuber”?

The lesson here is to not just say yes to everything that comes your way; make the choices that lead to where you want to go, even when there’s a risk involved.

How can I separate how I was doing from how I was doing “considering the circumstances”?

We’re on our way out of the dark!

And hopefully next year there will be another local Nutcracker ballet to go see. But, we all say “hopefully next year” about a lot of things these days...

Did I feel like a failure? Yes.

Survival of the fittest.

The Break Up with Your Bullshit challenge is over. I didn’t complete my goal but I got more out of it than just one completed story. The point wasn’t really so much about completing something by Nov. 21, it was about, as the name suggests, breaking up with bullshit excuses to not write and just writing.

I had a dream last week that I hugged someone. A big, long, warm hug. It felt so good and I didn’t want to let go. Like, this hug started for you but now I just need this hug to keep going.

I forgot to say last week why I was starting Tuesdays with Tish that week- because it was the first Tuesday after my birthday. I’m 31 now. Or, as my dad would say, in my 32nd year.

Oh, hello. Did you miss me? I missed having a reason to write frequently, and the act of publishing writing frequently. Even if no one actually reads it, I know it helps me write since I did so (almost) every week last year, which is a tremendous accomplishment for me in keeping a creative practice consistent for so long.

“I’m like the army, baby. I get more done before nine o’clock in the morning than others get done all day.”