We’ve thrown this pity-party year to the birds already, so let’s call it a loss. RIP 2020. Yet, it happens to be the rookie year that I found myself. So let’s not be so quick to give it the Big Bird.

Since we missed my one-year blogiversary (November 26), we might as well muse on how far we’ve come now while we’re still in a celebratory mood. Let’s make some noise!

When I started this blog, I needed to stir up some magic in my life again. I was feeling dejected and washed up as a mother (15+ years and the kids had grown up), as a wife (21+ years and Alex cracked all the jokes) as a writer (30+ years writing a non-existent book), and as a woman (50+ years, and I thought that was the hard part).

Not much to muse on, unless I looked at the bright side. (For the record, I wasn’t completely jokeless).

In fact, I planned to write about community theater. It brought great laughs when I had my midlife crisis in 2019 on the stage during Mamma Mia! And it would be there for me again in 2020 when I took to the page.

I planned to write about being in the musical Twelfth Night with the girls. I can’t sing, act or dance, so I’m an SNL skit in the making. As long as I embarrassed myself, and the girls could laugh about what I do wrong, what I wrote would be fair game.

That’s how I decided to post pictures of myself, or the dog, and Alex, who was most obliging–not to incriminate anyone else.

So marked the new rules of engagement with a teenager and another in the making.

From the start, I was talking to myself and calling my babblings a muse. I played it safe while I tried to figure out what to write about that wouldn’t get me into any trouble.

I didn’t want to put myself out there and draw too much attention to myself, either. You know, make too much of a fool of myself. Oof!

It wasn’t the first time I tried to hide. It was cute when I was little, and I’d play hide and seek with Mom. My turn came, and I’d stay where I was and close my eyes. I believed if I couldn’t see Mom, she couldn’t see me. (Not exactly my proudest moment).

It was no different than college when I thought I’d perfected hide and seek to an art form. How easy to hide on a big campus with 200 students in a class. I stayed close to my friends and went about my life undetected. Until a girl in my sorority, who hardly knew me, said to me, “You’ve got to meet my friend. He’s exactly like you, and I mean exactly.”

She had no idea what she was talking about–I never met anyone with a life like mine. But what the heck? I was game to get my mind blown away.

He was the guy version of me. We sat across from each other on twin beds in his dorm room and talked to ourselves. We finished each other’s sentences. Then we’d say, “I know.” Sometimes there’d be silence before we’d go off on another tangent that made perfect sense to us.

Our friends would come in now and then to see if we were ready to go out. But we kept talking until they’d leave.

We had never spoken about being the kid of a famous athlete, and especially not to ourselves. It was weird.

He had it worse. At least me not playing basketball was no big deal, no one expected a girl to play ball, but the fact he couldn’t play football, I had to apologize to him I felt so bad.

And after our confessional, we never talked again.

I didn’t speak freely again about my childhood until February when I published In Light of Kobe Bryant’s Muse. The number one reader favorite that had sparked something in me. Not that I cared to expose that part of my life. You know, “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

Yet, opening up about something I feared was too personal resonated with so many. You were there supporting me and urging me on.

So when Covid finally became a threat that scared our jokes away, canceled our theater, and made us repurpose sports without fans, I wrote about the golden days of basketball. It closed the distance between the scary pandemic happening in the world around us and brought order to the chaos.

Dad and I reveled in those phone calls. I’d call him up. “Dad, I’m going to write about eggs this week. Remember when the fans would throw eggs on the court?” And I couldn’t take notes fast enough.

But Dad wanted more people to read me, so he suggested I call Mr. Erving. I wrote Dare To Be Great after our interview, if that’s what you call it, I love talking to him because we get each other. He understands the life I lived more than I did.

Dad also set up for me to talk to Wali Jones, Dad’s teammate from the 1967 76ers World Championship team. It was stories I heard about but had no memory of. The Day After MLK was super fun to write because Mr. Jones, brought those stories to life for me.

People would write to me and say, “This is a chapter in a book.” And maybe so, I spent an entire week writing those posts, and they were too long for a blog. But you read them, anyway.

Meanwhile, the girls were using their extra time collaborating. While the world was in disharmony, they were breathing life into that 1971 Coca Cola commercial, “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.”

And when she wasn’t singing or attending virtual school, Alexandra became my official photographer (and later, my videographer). I’d come up with a crazy picture idea, and she’d frame it. And Skylar became my go-to editor. I couldn’t have made it through this year without them.

In May, I upgraded my website. Okay, I didn’t, but dear Kelly, my community theater sister, did all the heavy lifting. Made me look like I knew what I was doing.

With a professional site, I needed to break out in the blogging world. Stop acting like a rookie.

A dear high school friend of my Dad introduced me to George Vecsey. https://www.georgevecsey.com. I had been reading blogs trying to connect to other bloggers; that’s what you’re supposed to do, only I couldn’t find a blog I wanted to be like when I grew up until I found GV.

GV, the retired sportswriter for the New York Times and writer extraordinaire, opened up my eyes to the incredible things a pen and paper can do.

GV was my first blog writer role model, as Jocasa Wade became my first blog friend. https://jocosawade.com. She writes from the heart about writing her first book. She’s all the things I was too scared to be when I wrote fiction.

After Michael Jordan’s The Last Dance aired, I wrote a series on Michael Jordan and Julius Erving’s leadership styles. I never finished the series. Meanwhile, I shortened the posts, thanks to GV, who didn’t point out they were long, just that he has a short attention span.

And if that wasn’t enough, I spent a butt load of money on a copywriting class to sass up my writing.

Thanks to another dear friend, who suggested I bring in personal stories about the family, I did just that. I wrote about sitting next to Alex on an airplane, a steamy summer love affair, to regroup.

And I wanted to turn to more humor, but working at Comedy Central, didn’t make me a comedy writer.

So I took a comedy writing class. It was for screenwriting, but heck, the only thing it could do was hurt my bank account. It wasn’t going to break my blog.

And the girls sang on. They made a recording studio in the basement and started their YouTube channel in August. They were role models, teaching me what I could only say, but not do. “God gave you gifts, and using those gifts is your gift back to God.”

Back to school was already upon us, and we’d have to decide if they’d be in person or virtual? And, in the middle of that worry, like an incomplete sentence, I got cancer.

My first instinct? Go into my default mode. Run and hide, and definitely don’t write about it until it’s over.

But closing my eyes and thinking no one could see me only worked when I was little. Writing my muse had made me come out of hiding. There was no turning back.

And there was something more. Around the time I met the guy version of me, a dear friend pulled me aside and said, “Stephanie, I love you like family, you know that, so don’t take this the wrong way, but you have no style.”

Of course, I took it the wrong way. I couldn’t possibly get it at the time. Not store-bought style, that’s not what we’re talking about here, but personality style. All that hiding I’d done, not wanting to show people who I am played a number on me.

How can you find your style when you don’t want to draw attention to yourself?

And the same thing happened with my blog. I wanted to shy away from writing about the very things that could give me style.

So this was my big chance to find my style. Laugh my way through a journey in between sobs, meltdowns, and some pretty ugly moments. Make it something I could live up to. So I let in everyone who wanted to be part of my journey.

And family, friends, people I haven’t talked to in decades, all rallied. It was the most beautiful outpouring of love that I’d ever seen. I finally knew what it meant to have fans loving you and cheering you on.

And so it goes, my second most-loved muse was I Get High With A Little Help From My Friends.

A year and two months have passed and more loved ones are on this journey with me. At least I’m not talking to myself anymore. Because of you, I made it through my rookie year. I can finally say I found myself.