A Crane Painting and a Paddle, Both Gone by Sunday

I have been emotionally flat this week. Not sad, not anxious, not burned out in any dramatic way. Just neutral. The kind of tired that doesn't have a story attached to it. I noticed it and I didn't have much to say about it, which is its own kind of strange.

There was actually a lot going on. A kids book I have been working on is nearly finished, the first in what I planned as a series. I have an adopted son who has his own wiring, autism among other things, and for a long time I couldn't find books that talked to kids like him the way I wanted them to. Not books that explained neurodivergence to adults. Not books that dressed struggle up as inspiration. Just stories where a kid who processes differently gets to be the kid, without the deficit framing and without the toxic positivity either. So I wrote one. The first is called The Girl Who Reads Differently. The second will be The Boy with the Loud Brain. It also lives close to the name I play pickleball under, which I will get to in a moment.

The ANAC (Association Nebraska Art Clubs) convention was this week. I taught an adult class that was genuinely fun, they arrived ready, which is a gift a facilitator doesn't always get. Met some people I hadn't crossed paths with before, which at this point in my career still surprises me a little. They held a juried show alongside the convention. I entered a crane painting. The show was judged while I was teaching and I found out at lunch from a friend that it had been accepted into the traveling show, which means it moves around for a year. At dinner I found out it had sold.

I shrugged. I want to be honest about that. I really liked that painting, it was one I'd grown attached to and it sold at dinner while I was passing bread. I heard the news and nodded and moved on. That shrug is not nothing. It is a data point about the week.

There was also a small Unhurried Letters drama that resolved better than it started. I had been watching the growth numbers and feeling quietly discouraged, thinking the subscriber acquisition wasn't moving the way I wanted. Then I dug into the actual data and the numbers were fine. Better than fine, probably. I noted it, closed the tab, and felt approximately nothing. That too is a data point.

There was a separate payment issue where the last several orders weren't triggering confirmation emails or transferring funds, though they were showing up correctly in the software I use for that. Found it, flagged it, getting the kits out on time. Unhurried Letters itself is nearly ready to ship, end of next week if I can get printing back on schedule. The wood shop and yard continue their slow return to order. Kayak trailer parts arrived. The ordinary machinery of a life kept turning.

Saturday was the pickleball tournament. Elise and I have played together for a few years now. She is Awesome Sauce. I am Lil Dip, which is a name we came up for me as a small act of reclamation, a nod to the neurodivergent wiring and the brain damage from West Nile that occasionally makes me a little ditsy. It seemed right to own it rather than explain it. We have played together enough to move as a unit, to read each other without words, to cover without thinking.
Neither of us had played much in the past month. Life got crowded and the courts stayed empty. That matters. It shows up in your feet before it shows up in your head. And the entry fee had nearly doubled since last year, which left a sour note before we even drove to the courts. If this hadn't been our last tournament together before she leaves for Montana, I might have skipped it entirely.

The weather was perfect. That is not a small thing and I do not want to dismiss it. Cloud cover, sixty-five to seventy degrees, a slight wind that didn't amount to anything. The kind of tournament day you draw up in your head when you're hoping for a good one. Friends were there, people we both knew, the easy warmth of a shared community. It should have felt like everything.

Awesome Sauce and 'Lil Dip team and the last tournament for a little while (on the right)

There were two teams in our division. Two. We won some and lost some and finished second, which is also last, and I have been telling people both things depending on how I feel in the moment. Both are true.

Normally I love a close game. The score matters less to me than the quality of the competition, the mutual effort, the back and forth that makes you reach for something. That wasn't entirely there Saturday, not because of the games themselves but because neither of us arrived full. We laughed a lot. We always laugh. We talked the way you talk when you know a door is about to close for a while and you want to make sure you've said what needs saying. We had seven games and called it there when we would normally stay and play several more.

Before we left I gave her one of my favorite paddles. She thought she had a good one. My used one turned out to be better than her good one, which is a sentence that makes sense to anyone who plays and probably no one else. She'll take it to Montana. She'll think of me when she plays, a thousand miles away from the courts we shared. That part I didn't overthink. It felt like the right thing and I handed it over, almost feeling selfish because I thought it might bring her thoughts back to home on occasion

Here is what I keep coming back to. We both know what failure is and what it isn't. We've talked about this more than once, in different words and from different angles. Failing is living. If you're not failing at something you're probably not attempting much. Second place in a two-team division is not the failure I'm talking about.

"Ancient Sentry" 16x20 Mixed Media on cradled panel. (Acrylic, pan pastel, spray paint, graphite, pigment, colored pencil)

The failure, if I'm calling it what it is, is that I showed up hollow to something that deserved more of me. A last tournament. A last memory of us on these particular courts, together, before the map between us gets longer. The conditions were right, the company was right, and I was somewhere else inside myself. She was too, I suspect, though we didn't name it. You don't always have to name it.

I've preached the gospel of showing up imperfect, of honoring the attempt over the outcome, of releasing the idea that a moment has to feel big in order to matter. I believe all of that. I still believe it. The belief didn't protect me from the quiet disappointment of not feeling what I expected to feel, and I don't think I'm supposed to pretend otherwise. Then there is guilt for not being more fired up about a great week.

The crane is traveling. The book is nearly done. The numbers are good. The paddle is headed Montana soon. Some weeks the receipts are fine and the feeling isn't there yet, and you write about it anyway, because the alternative is pretending the flat weeks don't exist. They do. They are part of this too. And sometimes they hit me as just…meh.

Keep making, keep growing, be you.

Tio