What Comes After Self-improvement?

True confessions of... um, being okay

Happy new year readers from 17 days into 2023! It has been weeks (months) since I've written, and so I'm overthinking where to start. I mean, I started out writing these posts all about quitting drinking, then I discovered I’m neurodiverse AF so wanged on about that for a while, and I suppose now I'm just writing about - well - being ok.

Because 6+ years after I got sober and a coupla years after I got my double diagnosis (autism + ADHD, baby) I feel extremely ok. And that, to me, is very wonderful.

With this in mind, there’s something new I want to talk about here, something I haven't published about yet - but that has dominated my life for the last few years: my quest to get pregnant.

You see, I never thought I'd become a mum. Or I thought it fairly likely I wouldn’t.

But what would they do? I used to think, about this imaginary kid, now grown into an adult, as I struggled to make a living and create some semblance of home and dress/cook/live amidst great injustice and cruelty, while not especially find meaning in anything at all.

Over the last years, sobriety and therapy and rebuilding my relationship with the earth (hi, the earth! 😘) have made my life calmer, and more manageable, and diagnosis has made my experiences make sense. Life is sweet and peaceful a lot these days, and I’ve finally started to understand the appeal of having children. #lateadopter

Around 2019 we started trying. And in 2021 I got pregnant. It surprised me how exciting this was. A very pure and expansive joy that I am not sure I had experienced before.

I had just lost my lovely dad suddenly. And pregnancy felt logical and natural. One in, one out. I got really sick and watched how babies develop week-by-week on an app. And then at our first scan, we discovered I had lost the pregnancy, a while back, at around 7 weeks.

One out, two out.

That wasn't right.

I got pregnant again, not too long after, and the simple happiness was there again, only more tentative this time. We now knew that two sweet lines on a pregnancy test don't necessarily equal a baby.

At our first scan, we discovered there was no baby. Only a gestational sac.

The impact of these losses, after losing my dad, weighed heavily on me, on us, and I haven't really known how to begin writing about them. It's only in the last 6 month's I have found myself back at a kind of baseline.

And I’m sure that it's easier because as I write this I'm pregnant again. 22 weeks, this time and with two healthy scans. I can feel the baby flipping occasionally as I write.

And still we don't assume we will have this baby. But we might. We really might.

So here I am, beginning.

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This year I will be 40 and after years of self-development, I find myself repelled by self-help books. Maybe I'm finally ok with where I'm at. I’d rather read fiction, the way I used to before my brain broke, back in 2015.

So instead of resolutions, I’ve made some super-vague recommitments about where I will put my time. Please enjoy! And let me know yours, if you have the time.

2023 I pledge my time to TV, books, family, friends, the pets, REST (if the gods allow), writing and tending the earth (😎✌️😎).

What would you like for 2023? 💜

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If you’re struggling with alcohol, then read about how I got free at Beautiful Hangover.

If you want stuff on neurodiversity, then read Polite Robot.

And if you enjoy my writing and want to support my efforts then please share!

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Chelsey Flood is the author of award-winning novels Infinite Sky and Nightwanderers, and a senior lecturer in creative writing at UWE. She is currently working on a non-fiction book about getting sober and finding out she’s autistic, and a new YA novel.