Notes from Amy Spalding

Notes from Amy Spalding

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Notes from Amy Spalding
Notes from Amy Spalding
Staying Focused

Staying Focused

Spoiler alert: it's hard.

Mar 27, 2025
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Notes from Amy Spalding
Notes from Amy Spalding
Staying Focused
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Why is 2025.

Dear Readers,

To be deeply honest with you, my focus issues did not begin with 2025, the most cursed year I can think of. Yes, it is like the five-year anniversary of Covid lockdown in the US and so it’s weird to think about it as a less cursed time? But also as I type this a journalist just broke the story that he got war plans via a groupchat. The worst thing that ever happened to me on a groupchat was that I typed “I really appreciate all of you and you mean a lot to me” (YOU MUST UNDERSTAND HOW I HATE BEING VULNERABLE AND HOW HARD THIS WAS FOR ME TO SEND) and, responding to an earlier text and not mine (PROBABLY??), a friend immediately texted back, “Oh really? That’s weird.” I did think about walking into the sea, but instead I kept scrolling back to the weird thing above mine and reminding myself that there as a ninety-nine percent chance she was responding to that. However, given that I still think about this often and am telling you now IN CONTEXT OF A MASSIVE SECURITY BREACH I guess maybe “ninety-nine” is a high estimate.

Anyway I have not been super focused as of late. There are all these projects I want to do, some creative, some practical, and yet my brain just wants little activities of no importance.

Some of this is, I know, fear. No, believe it or not, not fear of our current sociopolitical state in the year 2025! I mean the old standard kind of fear, the fear of failure, the fear of having to put words into a little document that gets sent to a publisher while my agent asks the professional version of “do u like this enough to spend $$ on it”, because when the stakes are low I am fine(ish) but when the stakes are stakes I fall apart a little/lot.

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