Disappointed, unmotivated, a bit depressed, feeling like nothing I do really matters, but I’m still here. I mean, why not? What else am I going to do except write? I still like it. I feel better doing that than just about anything else, when I finally make myself sit down and do it. I do not have to please anybody when I write, as long as I keep it to myself, so why not keep writing? I am retired from teaching, so no papers to grade or meetings to attend, no students begging for just three points to make that C they do not deserve. No workdays packed with meaningless professional development and box-checking evaluations. No developing curriculum for other people to use.

I suppose, too, that I have good reason to be disappointed. I was hoping that I would be starting to market my teaching memoir by now, that I would have published my first book, but it was not to be. My would-be publisher said that I am sure to get another publisher now that the book has been professionally edited. That is what she said in the short e-mail telling me that the company had decided they were pulling back on projects that did not offer the expected return. Sigh!

Such is my life.

It doesn’t really matter anyway. I chose the teaching memoir as my first major writing project upon retirement because my mother had given me the idea, and she was getting older and not in the best of health. I finished writing the memoir that first year and entered a memoir writing contest, submitting the first chapter of the book. I won and found out that one of the prizes, I thought, that came with winning was publication. It took a while, but I was finally assigned a wonderful editor who had always believed in me and my book. We worked well together. On October 31, 2025, she contacted me to let me know that she had finished editing the book. I was able to tell my mother, who had just been released home from rehab after dislocating her artificial knee and breaking her leg. A little good news on one of the roughest days in both of our lives.

Ten days later, Mom died.

But I’m still here.

I have reason to be unmotivated. I will be 66 in a few days, and I sure do feel it as I recuperate from laparoscopic-robotic assisted abdominal surgery last Tuesday. It was outpatient surgery, so it should have been a piece of cake, right? I guess getting surgical mesh inserted robotically into one’s stomach takes some time getting over. Instead of using the time to be writing, I spend my days watching seven seasons of the eerily pertinent West Wing series, binging violent Norwegian mysteries, or falling asleep to the soothing voice of Penelope Keith as she travels through the hidden villages along the coast of England.

I could be spending time looking for a new publisher for my book. It’s ready to go, according to no-longer-my-publisher. It is hard to get motivated to face rejection when I had even been told to come up with some book cover ideas before I was unceremoniously dropped. I tell myself that now I have the opportunity to add back some things the editor wanted deleted. I can add them back and publish the book myself since it is relevant to this blog and my literary journal Teach. Write. Sure, I am better off on my own, I tell myself. Maybe so, but before people were waiting for me, helping me to stay on track. My publisher, my editor, my mom. Who is waiting for the book now?

I guess I’m still here.

I have reason to be a bit depressed, but I know me, and it will pass. My life, like the lives of most ordinary people, is more striving than succeeding, more valleys than victories. In the months since Mom died, and I lost the publisher to my book, I still managed to edit and publish another edition of Teach. Write. – 155 pages of poetry and prose by and for teachers. I also submitted a three-story chapbook, wrote and directed a short play for my church, started research on a new play. Yesterday, I downloaded a submission form from a local small publisher to see if there might be interest in a memoir from a 66-year-old retired English teacher who loved her job despite the crappy parts and by most accounts was pretty good at what she did for over three decades.

If nothing any of us does matters, then what do I have to lose?