Total pages in book: 147
Estimated words: 137135 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 686(@200wpm)___ 549(@250wpm)___ 457(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 137135 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 686(@200wpm)___ 549(@250wpm)___ 457(@300wpm)
Hello, burnout. My name is Sienna. Not so nice to meet you.
But there was one—juuust one—person who never once gave me shit about my message-answering infrequency. Just one, single, solitary human who didn’t guilt me, or make me feel like I was lacking or not good enough, who didn’t complain one time about anything that has to do with me.
Vivian Lowe.
Where the hell would I be without Vi in my life?
God, it’s scary to even think about. She’s been “my person” for nearly a decade now, and after every other person in the universe dropped out of my world, it made me realize I don’t need anyone else. She’s proven time and time again that she’ll be there whenever and wherever I truly need her. Even though she’s married and has kids who take up most of the time she doesn’t spend writing her own books—she was already published when I first met her—I know if I have a body to hide, she’ll tell her husband Corbin to watch the littles, drop her headphones and glasses on her laptop, and be there beside me with a shovel in tow.
I miss all the time we usually spend together, writing our books—complete silence between the two of us, but just the other’s presence soothes our artists’ souls. I think I miss that part of my career more than I do the income. If anything could get me out from behind my writer’s block, it should’ve been that—getting to spend all those hours with Vi, typing away. But instead, trying to force words out of my fingers while sitting across from her in our favorite coffee shop made my depression worse. It added comparison to the mix of shit a person shouldn’t do if they want good mental health. Her fingers would fly across her keyboard while I just plucked at my delete button.
So our writing dates dried up, because I didn’t want to bring her down, and without her acting as my writing accountability partner, I didn’t feel any type of urge to put fingers to laptop keys.
The only thing my fingers seemed to have the strength and function to do was swipe up. To scroll through pages and pages of shopping sites.
And it was while I was scrolling—on TikTok this time, fighting my addict-like urges to scour Amazon instead for some retail therapy, hence the reason my savings account was super depleted, because this conductor of the Hot Mess Express needs an obscene amount of therapy—that I discovered this lady who makes a living off dumpster diving. She found all sorts of brand-new stuff just tossed out for no other reason than to make room on the store’s shelf for new inventory.
Yet while she created a website to sell the items she salvaged, I have no interest in all that. The idea of having to deal with packaging and shipping stuff gives me hives on the best of days. But just seeing what I could possibly find in dumpsters in my area seemed exciting, the most excitement I felt in the past year and a half, actually. So much, in fact, that when I checked the time—2:24 a.m.— I rolled off my couch, then threw on my tennis shoes.
Because if I had no extra funds to shop my misery away, then maybe I could find some cool shit for free! At the very least, it would pass some time and get me out of the house. Even if it was in the middle of the night.
Out the door I went, and before I knew it, I was hiking my leg over the top lip of a giant green dumpster behind a sporting goods store.
It was the first store I found with an actual dumpster, because all the other ones I passed before it had these metal containers that attached to the back of the business—which I came to learn later in this journey were trash compactors.
I was a little disappointed there weren’t huge trash bags filled with cute workout clothes, shoes, or even… sporty shit I could give to my friend’s kid, but what I did find set off the creative side of my brain that hadn’t been activated in nine months of writer’s block.
At the time I unearthed it from beneath enough cardboard to ship every book I’d ever sold thrice over, I thought of it as a “big, wooden spindle thingy,” but googling my DIY gem the moment I got in my SUV after wrestling it out of the dumpster and into my trunk, I learned it was a cable spool. The dumpster was, in fact, right between the sporting goods store and what will eventually become a new franchise gym that was under construction. The cable spool was apparently what all the electrical wiring and stuff came on for the new business, and they just tossed this huge, wood, could-be-turned-into-a-masterpiece, blank canvas into the trash.