We awaken every day to a fresh batch of news stories, all speaking to us of a new reality that would have sounded impossible - the stuff of sci-fi stories - just a week (a day?) ago. We open our inboxes and scroll through a steady stream of messages from businesses, family, friends, all offering tips! and tricks! on how to deal with our new circumstances. This morning, one such email advised me to take advantage of this time to learn a new language. Another suggested that I start doing online yoga daily so that, when this is all over, I emerge from my home a lithe, well-muscled butterfly.

"Stay safe" has become the new email sign-off.

We are, at this very moment, living through a situation that is completely unprecedented in human history. That is a simple fact, albeit an overwhelming one to consider - especially given that for many of us, this whole thing still feels fairly theoretical. The enormity of the crisis is only magnified by the constant and unrelenting cycle of news and social media: We may be self-isolating, but we are still being flooded with a virtual avalanche of information - some of it accurate, much of it not, and all of it unsettling.

About a year ago, in Indonesia

A little over a year ago, I took two weeks out of my life to fly to Indonesia with my dad. The trip was logistically near-impossible to manage, and financially unconscionable for the both of us, but once we'd conceived of the plan actually executing the thing didn't even really feel like an option. For two weeks, Dad and I fell completely off the grid, and did nothing but play with manta rays and read books and talk and talk and talk.

My parents and I have always traveled together, once a year at least. I was an only child, so they had a habit of throwing me into the proverbial (or literal) backpack and slinging me along with them wherever they went - riding motorcycles up to Canada, hang gliding on the sand dunes in North Carolina, diving wrecks in the islands. Sometimes when we travel it's just me and my dad - as in Indonesia - and sometimes it's just me and my mom, but more often than not it's the three of us.

The family ornament we chose to sum up 2019

Well. THAT was a year.

I'm ready to be boring for awhile, please and thanks. Because 2019 was a lot of things - oh god, so many things; all the things - but a snoozefest it was not. I published a book that resulted in the most emotionally intimate and exhausting book tour of my life. I wrote two more that'll be out next year (you can preorder one of them now), and put my seventh (!!!) into contract. I started a new marketing side-hustle, and actually work out of an office (IMAGINE) a couple of days a week now. I moved. Again.

Last night was not the first night that I have appeared in my own personal horror movie. No no - that night happened several months back, on one of my very first nights alone in this house without the kids.

I had installed a very fancy security system that had alerts on virtually every door and window and crack in the wall, and so when I awoke in the middle of the night to what sounded like a moan in my backyard, screamed at the top of my lungs, and then heard my very fancy security system announce "GLASS SHATTER...MASTER BEDROOM WINDOW" you better believe I was up and out and hiding behind the china cabinet in my dining room in .02 seconds. Did I grab a butcher knife on my streak through the kitchen? Yes, yes I did.

The next thing that happened was that a very nice lady's voice came over the very fancy alarm system's very fancy control panel, and told me that she'd alerted the police. She asked me how I was; whether I had a weapon; whether I still heard any noises. Half an hour later, police still decidedly MIA, she and I had become old friends. I knew where she'd grown up, and how many kids she had. I was by then sitting cross-legged on the floor next to the china cabinet with the knife in my lap, explaining to her that I was a newly single mother and that I was alone in my house, not to mention the fact that I was blonde and wearing nothing but underwear, which means that if this had been a horror movie and someone had actually broken into my house, I would be oh my god, so extremely dead. Like, many times over.