January 16

• Project: The Dreams
• Total word count: 28,342
• Today’s word count: 19
• Thoughts: Today was the worst day. My mom’s cat Tuck had a check up at the vet today and I went along. He has cancer. It’s moving fast and we have some medication to keep him comfortable at home for a little while so we can say goodbye. It’s been a really rough day. I decided I wasn’t going to try to write, but eventually I found myself staring at my draft just for a distraction.
• Tomorrow’s goal: I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do. I feel really lost and my motivation has completely evaporated. I guess I’m just back to doing my best to exist.

January 17

No writing progress

I just didn’t feel like writing. It’s understandable. I honestly don’t know how I managed to write yesterday. I think I was just avoiding processing then. Today I just couldn’t do it. I’m just sad and I think I will be for a while. Hopefully it won’t be all sad all the time, but it will be generally sad for a while.

January 18–22

No writing progress

This week can be summed up as sickness and sadness. I’ve been in a major funk. My mom, my nephew, and I have been passing a cold around this week. As soon as I started to feel better, my nephew got worse. Of course, that coincided with babysitting time so I got a big dose of toddler germs and started to feel worse again.

On top of the cold getting passed back and forth, I’ve been struggling to cope with losing Tuck. My mom ended up scheduling him to be put to sleep at the vet Monday morning. I’m going with her. In the mean time, we’ve been keeping him comfortable with the medicine the vet gave us and just trying to love him and say goodbye. It hasn’t been easy. I’ll spare everyone the details (I’m pretty sure I’m not ready to relive it anyway) but I’ve seen things this week I wish I hadn’t. I’m still glad we brought him back home and had this week with him. I wasn’t sure at first, but now I know he was hurting but not yet ready to go. I’m sure of this because Sunday afternoon I got to see the shift in him. Tuck’s ready now. It just about broke my heart to see it, but I’m glad we gave him this week. He spent a lot of it cuddling with one person or another. He’d seek us out and spend a couple hours curled up next to on person and then move on and take a catnap on their lap. I’ll treasure these days even though I spent most of them on the verge of tears.

I’m on the mend physically now. Emotionally, I’m going to take longer to recover, but I’m hoping it’s the sort of hurt I can process through writing. It might end up being something that never sees the light of day, but I’ll try to write it out.