Holy Shit, Darling Ones,

I’m in a little bit of denial that 2025 is at its end. This whole holiday flew by in a flash. It went by so fast that I only took about four pictures the whole time. One of those pics were from our Christmas Dinner Saltine Taste Test. Premium won by a landslide, with the store-brand Hy-vee saltines a distant second. Zesta were a disgusting, weirdly plastic tasting third.

Even though there are still a few more hours left in the year, and I could be jinxing myself, I’m celebrating that I made it through 2025 with zero strokes and zero feels like a stroke situations.

If I had to sum it up, I’d say 2025 has been about coming to terms with being disabled. I’m not there yet, but I’m on my way. My goal for 2026 is to give everyone, including myself, more grace. Life is tough and petty judgements are easy. I need to get my inner critic to knock it off.

2026 is going to be about grace and creating.

I FINALLY got an appointment for my Social Security Disability hearing (April 20th) and if/when I get on the dole I want to spend my time making things. I told my family that come April 21 I’m gonna be a full-time artist.

“I love you think it will happen that fast,” Sister #2 said. Why does she always gotta kill my buzz?

I’m not entirely sure what this new artsy life will look like yet. For sure I gotta make four blankets (Gigi’s, State Fair, 2026 Temp, and Delilah’s). Plus, I have a vague idea of doing some sort of visual art/postcard thing for the songs I wake up with in my head. Oh, and I want to figure out how to make a book with the brown paper I’ve been saving all year. And writing more, of course.

My hope is with less financial anxiety I’ll have more brain capacity for other things.

What is your hope for 2026?

Love,
Jodi

The post So Long 2025 appeared first on I Will Dare.

Hello Darling Ones,

Happy last day of 2023. I hope the door hits it in the ass on its way out. This has not been my year.

I’ve spent the day mindlessly getting my house in order. I put a new air filter in the furnace, watered the Sadness Garden, and other minor tasks I ignored while my family was here for three weeks.

The day has also been spent wildly swinging through bitter jealousy and utter gratitude.

The jealousy stems from reading everyone’s year-in-review and I am bitter.

No fair people got to travel and eat cool foods and go to concerts and experience neat things while I sat around recovering from a stroke trying to come to terms with being disabled and freaking out about my my dwindling bank account.

What a rip off!

And, of course, I’m overjoyed that I’m still here to be jealous and broke.

Last week when I was leaving my last pool appointment of the year, my therapist wished me a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

“When you come back we can talk about our resolutions,” she said, watching me carefully lumber down the slipper stairs from the pool.

I reached the main floor and grabbed my walker. “My resolution is to continue living.” I shuffled past her on my way to the shower room to change.

“I think you can do that,” she said to my back.

“NO STROKES IN 2024.” I raised my fist in the air ala Bender in “The Breakfast Club” as I made it into the shower room.

My year has been pretty well documented, so I won’t rash it for you. You’re welcome.

Instead, I will tell you I’m cautiously optimistic about 2024 because my retina specialist eye doctor told me I could finally get new glasses. (I go to the regular doctor & the eye doctor in Tuesday.)

I’m 100% convinced these new specs will solve all my problems and will be irrationally disappointed when my right-side doesn’t magically feel lighter, my tremor doesn’t disappear, and the arthritis in my knees & ankles isn’t magically cured.

At least I’ll be able see clearly and more easily write about the crushing disappointment of still being broken.

YAY!

Happy New Year, Darling Ones. Thank you for sticking with me through this terrible, no-good, very bad ordeal.

Bring it, 2024!

Jodi

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So Darling Ones,

Looks like I made it to 2022. I hope you did too.

I had a very quiet New Year’s Eve with Sister #2, Ben, and I slumped into the furniture watching the entirety of the TV show “WandaVision.” Sister #2 has been obsessed with the Marvel Universe this year. Of all the offerings “WandaVision” was the only one that interested me. It was exactly the kind of thing I like a little sad, charming, funny, and smart. Take note, men interested in dating me. Because we are old we were in bed by like 12:15.

Now I begin the New Year with an empty house and a tired mind.

There are many ways to start off a brand new year and I respect all of them while also acknowledging my way is the best way.

I like to kick off a new year very slowly and quietly, like I’m sneaking up on it and don’t want it to see me lest it ruin everything. I mean, if the 2020s have taught us anything it’s that a year has a real way of ruining the shit out of everything. I peeped my January 01, 2020 post and it kind of made my heart hurt a little. It’s written by such an innocent who has no idea what the world has in store for everyone. It’s getting a bit difficult to remember the before times. As to be expected, last year’s New Year’s Day post is an emotional train wreck. That one makes my hear hurt too, because I was so fucking sad.

As for easing into the new year, thus far today I have woken up, eaten a giant breakfast, and taken a nap. Like I said, slow and easy. I’m 98.9% sure there is a gloaming nap happening soon, probably an early bed time too. I have miles and miles of sleep to catch up on after the social gauntlet that’s the holidays. I should probably be napping right now, but I like to get the first post of the year out the way ASAP. This is simply because I like to see another year added to my Archives list.

The only remotely productive things I’ve done today are change my furnace’s air filter and chosen which book I will re-read to kick off 2022. Drumroll please. . . it will be Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt. Since I’m turning fifty this year I thought I’d re-read a book I loved the year I turned forty. Aside: why does 2012 feel like it was roughly 186 years ago while the 90s still feel like ten years ago? I will never understand math and time.

I suppose, it’s getting to be nap time.

Love,
Jodi

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Hi Darling Ones,

I really want to crow about how we made it through this interminable year, but I don’t want to jinx anything.

People magazine jinxed the shit out of Betty White turning 100 in a couple weeks and we all see how that turned out. On top of that, my niece and her boyfriend thought they were gonna make it out of Minnesota yesterday after a few delays only to get to Rapid City, South Dakota where the plane turned around and brought them back to Minneapolis. They’re hopeful they’ll get out of here tomorrow. Keep your fingers crossed for them. They really miss their cats.

Speaking of Jaycie’s boyfriend, he’s a reader, which means I already adore him. Because he’s a reader we’ve spent a lot of the past three days talking about books. Amor Towles is his favorite, which means my goal in 2022 is to finally read A Gentleman in Moscow, which the Tea Ladies have been telling me to read for literally years.

He, along with most every body I know, is super impressed that I read 180 books this year. At face value, it sounds impressive and makes me seem like a super smarty lit person. If you look at that fun fact too long you can see the darker side of it.

You couple this with with a few other fun facts, that my most listened to records were “Midnight Organ Fight” by Frightened Rabbit and “Little Oblivions” by Julien Baker, and you’ll see that I had a dark, dark year that involved a continuous effort to escape my circumstances.

Franky, I am surprised I made it through 2021. While I wasn’t actively suicidal, there were more days than I can count where I thought, if I died right now laying on this couch that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

This year broke me in ways I am not ready to face. Simply thinking about 2021 makes my eyes sting with tears. I went thirty-two days without human contact, and I don’t think I can recover from what that says about me as a person.

As someone who has been a pretty sensitive crybaby my entire life, I am more fragile and brittle than ever before. It’s as though my emotional filter was deleted and I’ve lost the capability to deal with, well, anything. I’m either ice robot or sobbing pile of good. There is no in between, and I hate it. It sucks. Hard.

Despite all that I remain ever hopeful. I know this brittleness is temporary and I will likely feel something new sometime soon. Maybe tomorrow with a fresh new year? Maybe next week?

Anyway, I’m glad I didn’t die on the couch and made it through this wretched year. Thanks for making it through with me,
Jodi

The post The Struggle Was Real appeared first on I Will Dare.

Hey Darling Ones,

Do you like New Year’s Eve? It’s Sister #4’s favorite holiday, but Sister #2 and I hate it with a passion. Sister #2 because she hates big pressure holidays and because her BFF Jill died on New Year’s Eve 1991 so the entire day is soaked in melancholy.

Maybe saying I hate it with a passion is a bit of overkill. For the most part, I don’t put a lot of thought into it. I think I’ve done things on NYE maybe a handful of times in my life? I got really drunk and kissed strange boys at the bars in Eau Claire NYE 1996, which is the only NYE I spent in a bar. There were a few years where my family would get together with my J.Chromey cousins at the bowling alley. There was one year in the earlyish aughts where I had a lot of fun with a guy I was dating, but that kind of content is not for this family-friendly blog.*

For the most part, I’ve spent New Year’s Eve at home with my family, specifically Sister #2 & Ben. Sometimes the home was theirs and sometimes it was mine. When the niblings were younger we’d play games but now they are older, cooler, and legally allowed in bars. Last year we ate leftover lasagna and watched Beverly Hills 90210 (which I had never seen before). My guess is I was in bed by 12:15.

Even though I’ve never gone out clubbin’ or been to a bunch of NYE parties, I don’t think I’ve ever spent a NYE alone. This is why I’ve made myself a bunch of plans for tomorrow night, my first solo New Year’s Eve in memory. My goal is to not spend the entire day crying and missing all the people I love or pining for people I want to love. I mean, I can spend a little time crying, just not the whole day.

My plans thus far include:

• Sleeping until I get up and if this week is any indicator that might be 10 a.m. or later.
• Wearing my favorite fuzzy pajamas all day.
• Reading How to Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy.
• Making tiny cheeseburger sliders and roasted vegetables for dinner.
• Partaking in some alcoholic beverages, maybe getting drunk? Depends on if I land on the giddy side of buzzed or the melancholy side.
• Watching the Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit Livestream. I hemmed & hawed on this one, because it was $25 and I’m poor, but I decided it was probably better to have an actual thing to do rather than leave myself to my own devices.
• Again, depending on how the alcohol hits there may be some drunk texting, some ill-advised sliding into DMs. I mean, can I really leave 2020 without creating some kind of emotional havoc in my life? No! That’s foolishness.
• Writing about my goals for 2021.

What are you gonna do Darling Ones?
Jodi
 
*For many years, and maybe still now, a lot of people could not read I Will Dare at work because their company’s spying software would always label this site as pornography and then block it. Does that make me a pornstar? Probably.

P.S. I almost forgot, the infinite sadness has lifted because it was hormonal. It seems I had PMS? Which pisses me off because I haven’t had a real period since March so why would I think PMS was a thing I had to deal with and OH MY GOD PERIOD PLEASE STOP COMING ALREADY!

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