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Goodbye To What's Living Rent-Free In My Mind

One of the things that I wanted to do as part of my new year’s resolution is to be kinder to myself, and that includes doing something difficult: Letting go of the things and people who live rent-free in my brain and no longer letting the trauma or mental anguish they caused me to fester.  Is it a good idea to post all of this online for who knows how many people to read? To run the risk of sounding an overly-sensitive whiner complaining about every little thing that’s happened to me over the years? I don’t know. I do know that, as a writer, my words are my most powerful resource in aiding my own mental health recovery. I’m scared to share all of this, but even sitting down to write this has lifted a weight from my shoulders that has rested there for decades.  I know that a fair amount of these things I won’t actually be letting go of because they’ve formed me for better or worse, but I’m ready to let go of all of the emotions they’ve held over me for years and up to decades.  I’ll onl
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New Year's Resolutions

Hello, nice to see you again. It’s been a very long time since my last blog post because I’m awful at keeping up with things that I don’t believe I’m good at or think that people don’t even want to read. I’m planning on getting better at this whole thing because I do actually want people to know about me and what I’m up to.  I recently took a break from social media because I needed to clear my head and get away from the toxicity that is social media. I let it seep into my mind and my heart that I must absolutely be liked by everyone on there and I have to succeed based on how other people were doing—and that just wasn’t happening. Every failure was another blow to my mental health.  Why don’t people like me? Why don’t my posts get as many likes as other people when we’re often saying the same kinds of things? Why am I not gaining a mass of followers? What am I doing wrong? Am I doing enough? Do my contributions seem disingenuous? Why am I doing these things if I’m not getting anything
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Update on Writing

Woah, is there a lot going on—I hadn’t expected to write an update on my writing for another couple of posts, but I think it’s time.  My edits are officially done, and my book one is formatted and ready to send out to advanced reviewers, and it turns out that my book is going to be coming out a month earlier than expected in November! Lots, and lots of stuff going on.  I’ve been looking for a ton of reviewers to play a numbers game with the amount of reviews I can get when the book comes out—hopefully, it’ll pay off...especially with how long it took to find 100 potential reviewers for my book. It was an exhausting search, let me tell you. Most of the review sites that I looked at clearly hadn’t updated their lists in years . Some bloggers I found hadn’t posted since 2015. For places that are all about helping authors out, you’d think they’d do their due diligence and update their lists at least once a year.  I’m starting to get a little bit nervous about the whole thing: having to sen
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What If...?

I'm a very private person, so this post is going way outside my comfort zone. For those that follow me on Twitter, you might be thinking, "But you totally overshare!" I do, but it's not generally about feelings.  This week during therapy I was given an assignment to think about what my life would look like without OCD. My brain, functioning the way it does, decided to make it into a writing prompt.  Last week I talked about OCD and what it was like having it—I thought I did a good job of describing what it was like, exposing myself and my journey. But really what I was doing was giving everyone the likable authenticity of OCD. The bits that still make me feel like I'm being real, but instead I'm making it shiny for everyone so no one sees how bad it is.  This isn't that. “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” –Franklin D. Roosevelt OCD is fear itself. At least, once it reveals itself—but by then it’s too late. OCD starts as gentle hands helping yo
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Living with OCD

I want to start this out by saying that I’ll be talking about mental health issues brought on by the pandemic. If you’re uncomfortable reading or feel it might negatively affect you, I’d advise not reading.  “I’m just a little OCD.” “God, you’re so OCD!” Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is an oft joked about disorder, but the reality of it is much worse. I’m not being hyperbolic when I say it feels like being in a torture chamber of my own making, my brain being an inescapable hellscape that’s unable to let go of its incessant need for things to be just so. My OCD, along with my dyslexia and ADD, are things you’ll often see me talk about on Twitter . I do talk about it on Instagram , but I just haven’t been on there long enough to really dive much into it.  So what exactly is OCD? OCD is an anxiety disorder that causes sufferers to do certain compulsions to relieve the aforementioned anxiety.  Like with dyslexia, there are plenty of different types, but a lot of times they cross over. I’
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Living with Dyslexia

One thing I’m slowly learning through therapy is that talking about myself isn’t a waste of time—or something I should stop doing because that feeling of unimportance is my own anxiety turning against me, not an actuality. And talking about my struggles might help someone else feel like they’re not alone. If you’ve followed my writing on the Authors 4 Authors blog, you might have read my post where I talk about my dyslexia.  What is dyslexia? To put it broadly, dyslexia is a learning disability in reading, but it’s a lot more involved than that. This disability makes learning to read much harder for sufferers because it’s hard for our brains to connect the accompanying sounds with the letters, and the combinations they make. Not only that but letters and words often get flipped around both on paper and/or orally. Another area that gets affected by dyslexia is in math where numbers will flip, especially if they are similar shapes like 6’s or 9’s. (This is not the same as dyscalculia, w
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Who Am I?

The answer to that question should always be 24601—but in all seriousness, I would like to introduce myself as a new(ish) blogger. If you want to check out my blogs written for Authors 4 Authors, you can find them all categorized here . So, really...who am I? Well, my name is Rebecca Mikkelson, and I’m a fantasy author who works as an editor and the Chief of Business Development at Authors 4 Authors Publishing . I’ve been writing fantasy stories since my early teens for fun and I made my first foray into publishing in 2018 when my short story, “ The Measure of a Princess ,” was published for the first time in an anthology. (It has since been republished on its own in 2019.)   I currently live in Hawaii with my husband of nine years, who I affectionately call Mr. M on all of my social media profiles, where we enjoy not going outside and avoiding the scare ball in the sky. In my free time, I like to cross-stitch and embroidery to relax when my cats aren't hogging the embroidery floss
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