It’s hard getting started when you don’t where to begin or where you’re going. Yet, I know I need to go somewhere. I must write.

Writing lately has been a complication for me. I have stories I want tell, thoughts and feelings I want to share. Perhaps it is a bit selfish of me when I consider the chaotic state of our country right now, and the hard times my family is facing right now. Should I be writing dark fiction when people are losing jobs, facing financial instability, and in some cases, being wrongfully deported? Should I be writing stories to entertain knowing my parents’ current state?

I have aging and ill parents; my mother is slowly succumbing to cancer and my father is regularly in and out of hospitals for various ailments. He has his whits about him and is learning to adjust to the painful inevitable. She is taking things day by day as peacefully as she can with my daughter at her side providing companionship and care. I talk to them regularly, sometimes on video, filled with mixed emotions and wearing a happy face.

Meanwhile, Melissa and I are a thousand miles away in the midst of sun, palm trees, and endless amusements. It’s hard for me not to feel guilty living this life we worked so hard to build, but guilt seems to be a burden I’ve always carried, perhaps out of my own insecurities and fears.

One aspect of my guilt, which I have been reconciling and now recognize as fear, comes from knowing my mother will never see our new home outside of a video call and photos. I have to accept it and not give it any weight. I’m getting there.

We intend to travel to Connecticut soon, once we can work out the logistics, though I have this innate fear of potentially seeing my mother in person for the last time. None of us know when that will be; it could be months, years, we just don’t know. Therefore, I need to remind myself of my own advice to Melissa regarding alligators and the other local wild life: we cannot let fear dictate our lives.

Pushing through these thoughts is helping me find my way back to the writing I love, the place I need to go, despite the state of the world. I recently set a manuscript goal of 60,000 words for the end of this year. Writing this is my starting point.