And that’s me. I wish I could say that it was something far more glamorous, like “I won the lottery and we just got back from a whirlwind two-month vacation to EVERYWHERE and I met all these fabulous people and had these amazing adventures…and and and….”

In fact, it’s all a lot less exciting than that and far more like what real life is like. I don’t talk about work on this blog, so I won’t go into details here, but suffice to say that there were several major changes at work over the last several months, and the emotional turbulence of it all threw me off far more than I could handle. I’ve spent the last several weeks staying up later, just because the house is quiet then, and I can be alone to contemplate my thoughts or drown them out in some random entertainment from my TV. I’ve been incredibly busy during the days, which means that my nights have been mostly consumed with trying to catch up–or just keep up. I’ve barely exercised, though I’ve mercifully kept my weight from going up by simply eating sensibly when depression wasn’t inciting me to eat all the things.

In other words, life intruded and overloaded the circuits in my brain enough that I just put myself into a mini-blog-hibernation. I have all these thoughts and ideas that I want to post, and there’s the time and effort it takes. My day job hasn’t eaten up all of my time, but the roller coaster I’ve been on for the last few months has made “effort” something I was plum out of energy to source. I can look back now and say that I’ve been fighting with depression over the last few months, but it wasn’t at the point where I felt I needed to see someone. I’ve been LOW before, and I knew this wasn’t it. It sucked, but it wasn’t “What if I drive off the road?” bad, which I never want to experience again.

As I look forward to 2016, I have all of these great things coming on the horizon that I can’t wait to experience. I’ll be seeing my best friend (of 25 years) and finally meeting up with another friend who I’ve only corresponded with over the Interwebs, getting some fresh ink on my body and having desperately-needed girl time with these two amazing women. I’m also heading to another BlogHer, with my bloggy friends who always wrap me up in a whirlwind of silliness and swag that makes me think I’ve been transported to another universe.

And, with the exception of my newly bum left foot (a story for another day, after I’ve gone to the podiatrist next month and he’s figured out exactly what’s wrong), we’re all healthy and employed, I have a new car to replace the one that was starting to get too expensive to maintain, and things are generally on the right track. I just need to make sure that *I’m* on the right track, too.

It’s never all rainbows, but I suppose you can’t have one without some rain…