Today almost beat me. Which is different from “today almost won.”

It’s 7:30 pm. I’ve been on Zoom since 8 this morning—class, conferences, (walk the dog), class. Workshop, meeting, meeting, class. The Aurora is glancing off my window, and I have unwittingly finished a bottle of wine—I was just going to have a glass, then I topped it off. When I put the bottle back on the sideboard I realized there was only a sip left, so I finished it. And in the background of all this, my husband got a new job and my daughter attended school on a day in which a kid tweeted a drawing of a gun with a threat to shoot up the place.

I have not been this exhausted by so much emotional overwhelm since that day in 2009 when they cut open my belly and pulled out a human.

But here I am, furiously (dutifully? habitually?) typing a blog. Why? Because I can’t let the ordinary crowd out the extraordinary. Because I can’t let the ridiculousness of the world outside me derail who I am. Because fortune and destruction spin around me every day yet the world doesn’t end.

Though sometimes it comes close.