Unbelievably tired today. But feel pretty free. I’ve turned in both my book and that solicited story, so, for the first time in ages, I’ve got no firm and immediate commitments (at least w/r/t to fiction). And it’s almost summer. I love the summer in California. That’s a pretty controversial statement, I know. But people here on the West Coast don’t understand that summer almost everywhere else in the United States is absolutely miserable.

I’ve recently begun reading Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly. This is normally the place in the blog post where I’d apologize for reading a work of pop nonfiction whose author is primarily famous for a TED talk. But I won’t do that. This book is great. It’s about how to be vulnerable. The idea being that it’s difficult to take risks unless you’re willing to open yourself up to failure. And opening yourself up to failure is, in turn, is primarily about learning how to make space for and live with your feelings of shame.

These are lessons that I need to learn. I’ve always dealt with problems by bulldozing the emotional component: I just do the difficult thing over and over until I become desensitized to the pain. But I think there is an easier (though not necessarily easy) way. Anyways, I am too tired to go too much into depth about this.