The Room I’m Actually In

Lately, life has felt full in a way that is hard to explain unless you’ve lived it.

A lot of my days have been spent trying to help set up care for my aging parents, which carries its own weight. There are phone calls, appointments, decisions, logistics, emotions. Even when I’m not actively working on it, some part of me is still carrying it around.

At the same time, I’ve been writing Wheels every day.

I’m a little over 14,000 words in now, and the book is finally starting to come alive. That’s a good feeling. A needed feeling. But it also took some time. After spending so long inside the world of The In-Between, stepping into a new one felt strange at first. Different air. Different rhythm. Different emotional weather. I had to stay with it long enough for the new world to stop feeling borrowed and start feeling real.

Now it’s starting to breathe on its own.

What I didn’t expect was how much the book has started mirroring my actual life. I came up with the idea for Wheels before my parents’ situation became what it is now. A story about an elderly couple, dementia, old age, the slow erosion of someone you love. I thought I was writing fiction. I didn’t realize I was also writing toward something I was about to live.

There’s a detail at the center of the book: James and Maggie are transformed into twelve-year-olds. Given back young bodies. A second chance at the beginning. Maybe I understood that as plot when I started. Now it feels like something deeper. Maybe hope. Maybe fear. Maybe both. I’m still figuring out what my own imagination was trying to tell me.

I’m still submitting to agents, too. Still trying to be patient, which has never come naturally to me. So much of this season seems to be asking that of me: patience, endurance, presence.

That last one might be the hardest.

I’ve noticed how often I live one step ahead of my own life. I’m thinking about the next task, the next problem, the next stage, the next answer. I’m so wired toward what’s next that I don’t always stop to notice where I actually am.

And where I actually am matters.

Not just the future version of life where everything gets settled. Not the version where the book is finished, the agents respond, the family worries calm down, and everything finally feels resolved.

This part counts too.

The uncertain middle counts. The slow progress counts. The part where things are still becoming counts.

Maybe that’s what this season is really teaching me — not just to move forward, but to stand still long enough to recognize your own life while it’s happening.

In what may be the most random detail of this entire week, I bought a Jaws Lego set.

Maybe it’s a small attempt to slow down for an hour and focus on something that doesn’t need to become anything larger than what it is. Just a pile of little pieces. A set of instructions. Something in front of me instead of ten miles ahead of me.

Maybe I’m trying, in my own clumsy way, to learn how to be in the room I’m actually in.

— T.C.