Let’s soar together in the New Year. Let’s roar.

According to shitty magazines, new mothers should get their bodies “back” roughly six weeks post-birth. After I had my son in 1998, it was almost a year before I recognized my body. Even then, weighing the same as it did before growing and delivering a healthy human child, it was different. I did not get my body “back” as it had been.

Publishing a book is often likened to childbirth. Both involve tremendous work before and after. The debut changes everything. Long before I knew Not On Fire, Only Dying would be published, changes in me were underway. Writing this book reframed my self-perception, forced me to deeply consider what I meant to say. The manuscript, my thumping heart, was thrust into disinterested hands until the word “No” became a background thrum. Like most writers, I had hopeless days.

And then—the euphoria of acceptance, but, with it, fresh challenges: asking for blurbs, for opportunities to read and promote, for reviews; not to mention traveling to bookstores, standing in front of audiences, fielding questions—none of it came easily to this introvert. Sometimes I was hugely uncomfortable. But I did it. Of course it changed me, summoning courage over and over. I became myself. Stronger. I began to speak my mind in ways I hadn’t always, reject old roles I used to play. Once again, the shape of me changed.

On September 15, 2015, Not On Fire, Only Dying was born. Now it exists in the world independently, like my child. Some people connect with it and say lovely things about it. Some people don’t care that I made a baby or a book. This year I learned that some (who knew me once but not recently) just want me to be quiet. Compliant. They want me to play along. But I can’t do that and be this person I’ve become. This person I am.

A writer must reject those who prefer her as she was before her book, just as she must reject the gossip rag shaming a new mom for looking different. As if for months she did not make room inside herself, withstanding exhaustion and discomfort and fear of the pain of birth, of the baby not being what people hoped, of it being her fault. As if she did not suffer as her body wrenched apart to push this baby from cozy uterus, through cervix and vagina, and into other people’s hands.

As if she did not survive it, and triumph.

2015 shook my foundation and sent me soaring. With any luck I’ll have another year just like it soon. And I wish you nothing less. Let’s soar together in the New Year. Let’s roar.

cow licking clean its just newborn red calf