When Words Escape

I'm writing a blog post today because I'm having another one of those days that is totally obscured by fog. It's an experience that is pretty new to me.

This happened for the first time when I took a pretty hefty migraine medicine a few years ago that seriously interfered with my neurons. I sat down to write and was completely unable to grasp at the words floating around in my brain. It was the strangest, most unnerving feeling. I was relieved when my thinking returned to normal a few days after stopping the medication.

These days it seems to happen again when I'm going through some bad days, usually when my doctor changes my supplements around. Case in point: in the last three days I just haven't been able to find the right word when I'm speaking or writing! I feel like I've aged forty years in just a few hours, probably due to some supplement changes late Thursday into Friday.

I take comfort for now in knowing that it's probably temporary, and that in a few days my full vocabulary will come back as I start to adjust. But I also feel a little unsteady when I think that as I get older, the temporariness may turn into permanence. That I may lose the ability to grasp for those words entirely, or for a long delay of time.

As a writer, obviously being able to find the right word is hugely important.

I remind myself that there are people like Toni Morrison (86) and Stephen King (70) who are still writing well into the winters of their lives. And I tell myself that even if I struggle as I get older, the words will eventually appear long enough for me to grab them. At least I sure hope so, because despite lots of attempts over the past decade, I feel like I haven't even started yet. I'm just about to start, really.

And I have more urgency now because I've been sobered by a lot of cancer surrounding me lately. Both with people I'm close to and with those who I know but am not particularly intimate with. And I've also recently passed a two year milestone for my own illness journey that may or may not have an eventual resolution.

The reality is that I'm running out of time.

And while I can say, oh that's silly, I still have plenty of time...none of us knows how much time we have left. We hope it's longer than just tomorrow, or just next year, or just ten years from now. And even if it is, so many times I hear people say they woke up to find time had just evaporated, and here they are nearing the end of the road.

And I guess now that I think about it, maybe it's better to write and leave holes for words than to not write at all. At least I produced one thing today. We'll see what the next few hours holds.

I Woke Up Like Gene Kelly

I woke up like Gene Kelly today. And not looking like him, of course, but rather feeling like the emotions he conveyed in his iconic scene in Singin' In The Rain. It was a nice feeling, especially after I'd had a pretty shitty morning the day before.

I'd been late getting started and I was in a bad "it's Monday again" mood. I'd also been up sick most of the night, was mad at my cat, and had attempted to ignite my motivation by dragging myself by my shirt collar into my office. I subsequently plopped down and shot venom at my Monday morning To Do list, which I'd long ago decided was indeed a list of mindless crap (to me, I'm sure someone somewhere loves updating websites all day long).

But my day took a different turn partway through, and that's why I woke up feeling like Gene Kelly. Because I'd decided around lunchtime that I was finished with that damn To Do list. I was finished wasting my days on something that I hated, something that made it impossible for me to enjoy the things I didn't hate, and something that made me think I may as well keel over from my chronic illnesses and call it a life.

I talked to my husband, put a plan in place for a graceful exit over the next two and a half months, and then I sat back, crossed my hands behind my head, and basked in what felt like my first deep inhale in years.

Now this freedom does not come free. There are financial issues to tend to, there is an element of risk, there is the unknown, and there is a lot of fear. But I find that when you get completely fed up with something the fear just kind of drowns itself in a puddle. All you can see is the ugliness of where you've been stuck and the promise of cutting the chains and running off into the sunlight. And this is what makes you decide to finally change.

I just drove up to the grocery store after having being stood up for a conference call, and I bought some stuff to make tomato soup tonight. This is the first time I've felt like trying a new recipe in I don't know how long. It's like I found my old self again.

And last night? Well last night I wrote an essay for my book that now puts me at 30 essays, 157 pages and almost 46k words. I'm finally moving on my creative work again and it feels like this is my old self coming back too.

It's amazing what a difference a decision can make. My life is no different today than it was yesterday, except that I finally chose to stop being stuck and to put an end date for said stuckness. To shift back into something that has meaning for me and to get off this hamster wheel that I keep talking about.

The best part about this story is that I just had a really great interview today with, of all places, a medical group of gastroenterologists. How perfect is that?

Serendipity? Synchronicity? I sort of think it's both.

This Blog is a Crutch

I just finished reading this really phenomenal book called All The Light We Cannot See. It won the Pulitzer and I can see why, because it was amazingly poetic in its language. The story was deep and rich, the characters felt alive. I was sad to put it down. And that's the best kind of book to read I think.

Now I'm pretty sure I will never achieve something like that unless I take some sort of surprise turn later in life. The stuff that wins awards is the stuff created out of thin air, and I don't have a fiction story in my head to flesh out and turn into award-winning prose.

But the author did inspire me to continue pushing forward in my own work. Because to toil for 10 years on something (that's how long it took him to write it) and have the finished product affect people in that way...well how rewarding is that? How meaningful can you get?

I just wrapped up another birthday on Friday and therefore I can announce I'm now 37 years old. It was a challenging day in some ways because our plans got messed up, but at the end of it all, things turned out just fine. I got to be with my favorite person, I fed the ducks at the pond, and I ate some really delicious cake.

But the day after was better, because I woke up with renewed vigor and determination (although I finally got some sleep and didn't wake up feeling like death, so I'm sure that helped). And I've been rubbing my hands together ever since, trying to plan and scheme my way into finally achieving the things I want to achieve. To finally applying myself, and using my writing talent in ways that mean more to me than what I've been doing so far. Which I'm not sure is much of anything of importance.

I could be being a bit hard on myself, I suppose.

I realize now that I use this blog as sort of a crutch many days. It's a way for me to write when I want to write, in a public sort of way, without the pressure of having it be anything worth reading. A baby step, really. Because when I write here it can just be a post. And it can just be average at that. And maybe nobody will even read it.

And that means all the internal pressure to succeed instead of fail sort of gets washed away, allowing me to write here without fear most of the time. Now while I think it's good that I have a place to go to keep my skills alive, I think it's bad that I turn to it when I could be turning to other things that have more risk. Like the two books I'm working on. Or the three other abandoned manuscript drafts saved to my hard drive.

They say that realizing something is half the battle, right? I think that being able to verbalize I'm afraid is a really important first step. I also think that as the years pass by I become less afraid, because I have less time. And when you start running out of time you start running out of fear. Fear about doing things, anyway, because the fear of not having done them starts to grow over everything like a rogue English ivy.

So this week I'm going to sit down and write. It's a new year for me, a new start. I'm still afraid, but maybe a little less so. Maybe I can push through that fear and do something, at least for a little while.

And if/when I can't? Well, I'll just keep coming here. Because it doesn't hurt anyone and it keeps my mind and fingers practicing, so that when the day (or days) come that I'm finally not afraid anymore, I'm ready to take off from the gates.

Discontentment is Motivation

I was sitting on my couch feeling a little sorry for my husband and myself. We were supposed to be having an adventure in Florida, celebrating my birthday with Mickey Mouse and the ocean, and instead we are trapped at home while he ices his injured knee. It's not been a good day overall, but I did notice a writing itch building a few hours ago.

I ignored it for a long time. I've been ignoring it for days really. I always feel like I have a million reasons why I can't write (being tired, feeling depressed, tending to my husband, not knowing what to say, needing to do paying work) but honestly it always boils down to fear. And I've not figured out the secret to overcoming it yet.

I don't know what the tipping point was today, but after dinner I decided to write about what was bugging me currently - how life doesn't ever go as planned. It was another essay for my book and it ended up being almost 1500 words, which was a pretty good contribution for one day even if it turns out to be all crap.

I think that discontentment can be a supreme life motivator, with the caveat that it has to be at a certain level. You have to feel knocked down, trapped, nowhere to go - but also still energized somehow. Otherwise you just get depressed and stew in inertia, spinning in circles like that hamster wheel I talked about.

I really wish this happened more often but it seems like the mix just usually isn't right. I'm not able to put the negative energy aside in pursuit of a higher goal. And that's where the inertia gets in the way. I kick the discontentment aside for...depression, black holes, mindless social media scrolling, general time wasters.

I'm encouraged that I wrote something finally today, since I've been feeling it coming for a few weeks (I wrote about it not too long ago). I guess that for me, when I'm being blocked by fear, discontentment is sometimes enough to overcome those emotions and actually move toward action. So maybe that's the secret. Or maybe I'm just a scared, unmotivated wannabe writer who can't get anything done. ;)

Settling Into Metaphors (of Life)

Sometimes I think about metaphors to describe how my life feels. Hamster wheel comes to mind. Groundhog day. Broken record.

It sounds a little depressing when I read it, but sometimes it's just reality and you have to embrace it. Because fighting it and wishing for what was, or what could be, is even worse. So instead you own that reality until you can come up with a better strategy.

I saw my longtime counselor yesterday. And I'm not ashamed to say that I go to counseling, because I think it's never shameful to say that you help yourself. And during this particular session I bemoaned my hamster-like existence. My feelings of being stuck, of wasting my life, of not living my purpose or of even finding one, because I'm stuck in my current reality.

And after congratulating me for being improved enough health wise to even care about a life purpose, she reminded me that right now, what I need to focus on is getting well. The end. Nothing more. So I'm trying to do that today.

I got up after another rough night and I approached my day from a different mindset. And that meant that today I wasn't stuck, or wasting my life, or miserable. Today I was doing what I needed to do to pay for the things I need to pay for to get well. That's all.

And when I looked at it like that, some of the gray lifted. Some of the despair dried up. And that's probably what's allowing me to sit here and write something this evening. Which is what I always seem to want to do, but can never seem to achieve.

I know that my writing doesn't happen when I'm depressed, unless I'm just vomiting my emotions into the world (I've tried not to do that since I left my twenties behind). But non-depression doesn't happen when I'm sick chronically. I've sure tried. How do you wake up with a positive mindset when you've been in pain and are fatigued? Again? (hamster wheel)

So my task lately has been to navigate what I have in front of me without feeling like I'm losing something in the rearview mirror. Or missing out on something. Or taking a wrong turn. I mean, I still write sometimes don't I? I'm doing it right now.

I tell myself that one of these days I'll be able to get the things done that I want to do. I hesitate to say that, because it's not usually effective to fall into the "if only" trap. The "if only I had this, then I would feel this" thing. Because life doesn't really work that way most of the time.

Except maybe it does when you're in a situation like I'm in. Maybe I can say, with confidence, if I had my health then I would have more happiness. I would write more. I would do more. I would achieve more.

Yeah. Maybe.

But for now I'm not going to think about that, because I have getting well to tend to. For now I'll settle into my metaphors and just keep trying to find the light. And jet off to the beach for my birthday, to breathe in some peace.

Edit: Trip cancelled at the last minute. I guess I'm still on the hamster wheel.

I Like to Mull a While

When I start pulling out of my funk, that is when I start making my way back to my computer to put something on the screen, I've noticed I go through a process. And really it's a two part process:

1. Brain
2. Fingers

I know that sounds a little silly. So what I actually mean is that my brain always flatlines while I'm on a writing hiatus in the sense that I don't think about writing. I don't care about it. I don't spend any time paying attention to ideas or trying to harness them. But then somewhere along the way things start lighting up again, and I find that my brain revs up and mulls on things long before anything happens with my fingers.

I am not one of those people who just sits down to write because I need to write every day. I don't. And anyway, I write for my day job and always have. So I'm often doing some bit of writing anyway - even if I'm not thinking about it. But what I do find is that sometimes I do need to write. I do need to sit down. I do feel a pull to get it done now, before whatever I have to say is lost forever - although the important thing to notice is that there are always days or weeks of quiet mulling, without any action, before I get to that point.

I think there's a bit of synchronicity in this process. Have you ever paid attention to synchronicity?

Today I was driving to a meeting and I flipped on NPR. Now I haven't flipped on NPR much in the past few months because I'm just tired of the political drivel, and worn down from hearing about the depressed state of the world. But I tuned in today.

And today there was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author being interviewed about her latest book and her writing process. And it added fuel to my insides. It reminded me of what I hope to do. What I wish to do. And it was another increase in the churning that's actually been going on quietly for the last week or so (I went and jotted an idea in my notebook, randomly, maybe three nights ago).

I hope this means that I'm going to sit down to write again soon. So many people would say, "Well just sit down and write. Why don't you just do it?" But I have learned through experience that I can't control whatever this is that makes me write at all. And therefore my writing is probably always going to come in spurts and then fade out again.

It will come when I am calm enough, healthy enough, and in a good enough place to channel the messages out of my unconscious. I'm just not in that place most of the time.

And I think this is ok. People tell me it's not ok but I've decided it's ok. And this makes life a lot more peaceful because I don't have to feel like a constant failure. Or like a hopeless procrastinator. Or like a never-been (as opposed to a has-been).

Who makes the rules anyway?