It’s not you, it’s me

To all those friends, family, colleagues, neighbours, readers, and random strangers who have sent me email, postal mail, texted, left voicemail, responded to blog posts, or on social media, and been roundly ignored: sorry.

Please don’t take it personally. Please don’t read anything into it. It’s not about you. I am deleting most communications unread or unheard—sometimes even, in the increasingly rare instances where I have begun a conversation, in the middle of same. I’m doing this to survive. I have no bandwidth. This one time, it’s not you, it’s me1.

Why? Well, that’s a fat, intertwined braid of several stories at once, some of which I’ve dealt with and am trying to recover from, or at least adjust to, some of which have moved into a new phase, and some of which are currently so overwhelming I don’t want to give them any more space by talking about them. So for now I won’t. I’m not deliberately trying to be mysterious; I wouldn’t even have brought it up if I wasn’t about to attend Worldcon.

Starting tomorrow afternoon, I’ll be out and about at Seattle Convention Center and at the main hub hotel, the Sheraton Grand. (My schedule of events are here.) If you see me and want to chat, but think, Oh, I emailed her and she ignored me, she probably doesn’t like me or want to talk to me: Not true! For one, I probably don’t even know that you wrote to/called/messaged me, never mind what about. And two, the point of conventions to me is hanging out with people: the odds are very good that I would actually love to talk to you and/or set up time to chat later.

I’ve been doing what I’m doing in order to keep my head above water. There’s a lot still ongoing (during the convention I’ll have to disappear here and there for a few hours to attend to various non-con things; some planned, some probably not, sigh). But while I’m there I’m hoping to actually be there. So please do say hello. If I have hurt your feelings because I appear to have ghosted you, please give me some grace. My silence really—truly—is not personal.

And if we don’t see each other, well, have a great convention!

Before this—and most likely long after all this is in the rearview mirror—nine times out of ten if I ignore you it’s because I want to. ︎