Holy cow… I got approved from my next ARC yesterday. The Devils by Joe Abercrombie. I am excited because I put in a request for 4 books the other day, thinking I would not get approved because some of them are really big names. And I have been checking my email regularly to see if I get lucky and I did!

Now granted I have no clue who this author is but a quick look at their Goodreads showed me that have a decent following so I can’t wait. After I finish The Starless Sea I am going to dive into that! So stay tuned for those updates.

How are you all doing? We finally made it to December! I do not know how we did it but thankfully this year is almost at its wrap. Which like great because this year sucked. It is funny to me because at the start I said “I am not going to say that this is my year because it always goes shitty when I do.” Well, the world said “Jokes on you KID” and it was the worst year of my life (expect the engagement part. That was pretty cool).

But its the final month to get things done before the year starts fresh. So I sit here reflecting all of the things I did not get to do this year. But while I think that something my former therapist said to me comes to mind.

“What would happen if you just fell off the Earth for the year. Took the time for yourself, not worrying about others? The thing is nothing would… life would keep going on and you can just re-enter once you are ready.” And that has stuck with me. Minded my lack of presence started well before January 27th, I feel that. I am sorry to the friends I have not kept in contact with, the plans I missed out on, and the celebrations I skipped, but I needed to take my time to find myself.

According to the American Psychology Association (APA) (2024) about 44% of people at the age 49 have lost one parent. And in 2021 Census.gov found that 11.4% of 20-29 year olds have lost one parent. Which makes so much sense on why I feel so alone. I mean that’s roughly 2.5 million people that are in my age bracket that have lost one parent (which is less than 1% of the population). Let that sink in for a second. 0.75% of the population in the United States are like me. OMG throw in being gay and that population is probably so small. This is not meant to make anyone feel bad. I just wanted to look this up and tell someone. And I love my Fiance so much, however I for sure am going to tell them this but I want to tell more than just them.

So it’s hard to find people that relate to this problem currently in this demographic. But what I wanted to take some time to talk about the ripple effect.

Picture this, you are at a quiet pond, no waves or anything. To throw a rock into the water and there is the first big splash but the water ripples out from that, disturbing the surface of the water. Grief is like that. You have the initial loss, the death of the person but from then there are so many more losses that are caused by this.

• Loss of confidence
• Loss of security in relationships
• Loss of worldview
• Loss of financial security
• Loss of joy

These are just some of the secondary losses that you might feel. The thing is I did not even know I felt these until I read these somewhere months ago. It just all sort of clicked into place and overwhelmed me. I think the weirdest loss that I felt was my mortality. Like of course I know that death can get me at anytime, but occasionally I will be doing something and my brain will say “does this matter cause what if you die.” (I think this is what some call an encroaching thought). Because the other day I was thinking about books and my collection that I have and my brain said “Why collect them, cause they won’t go with you when you die.”. Another time this happened was with this blog. I was typing something up and my brain just popped in a thought “who’s going to read this when you die, so what is the point.”

Every time this happens I just stop dead in my tracks and just try to think the opposite. It is such a weird thing that never happened before my dad passed. Do you have anything like this reader?

References

Hayward, G. M. (2023, March 17). New 2021 Data Visualization shows parent mortality: 44.2% had lost at least one parent. Census.gov. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/03/losing-our-parents.html#:~:text=More%20than%20a%20quarter%20of,and%20Program%20Participation%20(SIPP).

Huff, C. (2024, October 1). Grieving the midlife loss of a parent. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2024/10/grieving-parental-loss-midlife