I’ve been offline for a while, traveling with my family and being generally overwhelmed and a little bit hidey. I’m emotionally under the covers, so to speak, and longing for a good book and a bathtub in which to lose myself for, oh, say, weeks and weeks.

It’s hard to know at times like this whether it’s simply too much going on that makes me hidey or if this is a resurfacing of the Depression Dragon. I’m shrugging my shoulders at you right now and mumbling, “I dunno,” ’cause I don’t. Not yet. Too soon to tell. The Depression Dragon may be waking, or I just may need to remember how to breathe.

When I get hidey, I usually want to stay hidey. It’s like an ever-increasing cycle of hidey-ness. I hide; therefore, I want to keep hiding.

Part of being hidey for me is listening too hard and too long to the voice in my head that tells me I have nothing to say, nothing worthwhile to contribute, nothing that might help others in their hidey-ness to feel less alone. I’m learning in my older age not to listen to that voice, though, because that voice is unkind and also a lying liar who lies.

So I’m just taking this one minute to throw this out there. To say, I’m hiding a little. And to wave at you from under the emotional covers… just with my hand outside the blanket, and maybe one eyeball. Waving and waving in the dark, even though this dark is of my own creation. And to ask, muffled by my covers, how are you? How are you, friends? Would you take just a minute and tell me if you’re hidey, too, or if you’re free and wild, or if you don’t know? I think, perhaps, if we all might bring our blankets to the party — the blankets we’re using to hide or the blankets we’ve discarded — that we could build a little fort here together. And maybe someone can bring a flashlight. And a good book. And a few pillows. And we might make a party.