Adrift

I haven't been writing here lately because it feels lonely and pointless. I interact with people on Facebook and in real life, and my non-blog writing has more structure and momentum. I started my novel in a month yesterday, and have been writing like gangbusters. Here I have just been feeling...adrift. So I'm taking a break for a while. I'll come back to it when and if I feel like it. All the best to you, if you're reading.

Busy

I wrote in my last post about the difficulty I have fitting all my commitments into the hours in my days. I didn't write "how crazy busy my life is" because I am hyperaware of how people use "busyness" to get status. I don't want to be one of those people, so when people ask how I am and the urge to reply, "Busy!" arises, I bite it back and say, "Fine, thanks."

Aware of this "Look at me, I'm so busy!" status-seeking, I'm often a little hesitant to tell people I'm busy. People close to me to whom I've sort of half-apologized for mentioning being busy have assured me that, compared to the commitments of a childless lady with a dog and a lot of book clubs and church committees and homeowners' association board meetings and lunches with friends, my commitments are mostly of the kind I can't just politely say no to. Yes, it's true I could give my kids more fast food and frozen food than I do, also true that I could let my house be dirtier than it is, but I already feel like there's too much pizza and clutter in my house for anyone to confuse me with Martha Stewart.

What's that you say? I could give up this blog? Why, yes, I could. Don't think I haven't thought about it. Back when I was writing my public blog, I frequently contemplated giving that up, too, because the voice within me that whispers words of Bad Mother Shame into my ear said I should, that I owed it to my kids not to give anymore of myself to pursuits that didn't involve them.

That voice is what my friend Eleanor calls a demon, and I know that if I ever let it start running my life completely, I will  become a bitter, angry woman who does more damage to her children than I do leaving them to amuse themselves while I write.

Why do I write? I may as well ask why I breathe. I cannot remember a time when I have not written. My eldest daughter writes, and my heart sings that she doesn't hide her scribblings the way I used to her at age, that she talks to me about her stories once in a while as I never talked to anyone about mine. It tells me that my writing has caused, at worst, benign neglect.

So where am I going with this? I suppose I am trying to talk myself into or out of taking on another writing project: NaNoWriMo. I've wanted to do this before but never did. It's next month, so I have only 17 days to decide. I tell myself it's crazy because I'm already overcommitted and can hardly find time for all the things I have to do now. On the other hand, it's only a month, and then the craziness ends. If I try and it's too much, I can quit. If I don't try, I'll go on wondering what would have happened if I had.

I guess that means I've found the answer.

Procrastination Is Fear

It is. I know it is. And yet, knowing it, I still do it.

I'm writing a memoir. I tell myself -- and the few other people I get brave enough to tell, except one -- that it's only for myself, a form of self-therapy, that I have no intention of ever trying to get it published. Why would I? Why would anyone want to read my story?

I know the answer. It's the same reason I read other people's memoirs and blogs. I enjoy it, and it helps me, helps me see that it's not just me, that other people go through the same things I do, have the same problems, the same self-destructive, self-sabotaging thoughts and fears. My story might help others and others' stories have helped me.

Then why am I afraid to say that to people? And why am I afraid to write it?

Six Days

It's been six days since I posted.  At that time, I intended to write every day.  There are so many things I wanted to write that I couldn't decide which to write first, so I didn't write any.  I wish I could say this wasn't typical of me.  I have become a fearsome procrastinator.

When I was younger, I was pretty good at delaying gratification and forcing myself to do the hard stuff now in order to get the good stuff later.  In the last few years, however, that ability seems to have disintegrated.

A book on Jungian psychology I was reading recently (something about the Shadow, but I don't want to stop and look up the title/author now) said that midlife is when the Shadow often makes its appearance, and people do things they never would have done before, things that are out of character.   This is what society popularly calls the Midlife Crisis.
I suppose that procrastination, like sensuality, is one of the things my responsible, virtuous younger self stuffed away into the bag in which gestated my Shadow, and so it is not all that surprising that these things would manifest themselves at this time.

Now I have to go do things that someone with my obligations and responsibilities has to do.  I hope to write more later today, but I will not be surprised if I do not.

Go Write Something

Yesterday I wrote my first blog post here since January, and it felt good.  I have been keeping a journal since July, and thought about posting some of those entries and dating them with the dates I wrote them, but somehow that felt inauthentic, as though I would be tampering with the temporal integrity of this blog.

This morning is the end of daylight savings, when we as a society collectively tamper with the temporal integrity of nature's time, something I dislike.  I wish the whole country could be like Arizona, and leave Time alone.  Therefore this blog will be a literary Arizona, and instead of back-dated entries, I will share some of those earlier thoughts as quoted entries.

July 3, 2013:

Go write something.

That was how Eleanor ended the email I read at 5:30 this morning. I had emailed her last night about a book I had recently finished, The ONE Thing, which made me realize that writing was my ONE Thing, but for years I had done nothing to make that desire a reality.  She drew attention to my having written, “Of course a working mother can’t focus on just ONE thing,” pointing out that whenever we say “can’t” and “of course” together, we are limiting our thinking, usually out of fear and demons at work.  And so instead of getting on the elliptical, I sat down at the computer. 

One of the things that book said, which I already knew, was that it isn’t discipline or willpower that makes people get things done, but habit.  I know that.  The reason I was up at 5:30 and about to work out is that getting up early and working out has become a habit.  The importance of habit hit me yesterday at the office when everyone gathered in the kitchen for cake to celebrate a coworker's birthdays.  I didn’t have any, because not having cake has become a habit.  I join the crowd to socialize and don’t give the cake much thought. 

If writing is important to me, I need to develop the habit of writing, so that I write as automatically as I get up to exercise or forego cake.  Until a little over three years ago, writing was just such a habit.  I wrote every day, in several venues, including what I hoped were final revisions of a book for which I had a publisher – not some vanity publisher or fly by night publisher but a real publisher that had published real books sold in real bookstores.  An editor liked the sample chapters I had sent, and wanted to see the rest.  I was working on getting it ready – getting it just right, getting it perfect, even – when I took my eyes off that ONE Thing, and let the brass ring slip out of my hand.

In retrospect, it is as clear as day to me that I should have just sent the damn manuscript as it was.  It wasn’t perfect.  What is?  I could have continued to work on the rough patches under the guidance of a professional editor at the publishing company.  But it wasn’t quite perfect….and it had to be perfect.  Once again, as I had done so many times in the past, I had let fear, manifesting itself as perfectionism, keep me from following my dreams. 

Eleanor had reminded me in her email of something I already knew well, that we so often let our demons limit our thinking, keep us from doing the things we most want to do.  Fear and perfectionism were two of my demons.  They have been for as long as I can remember.  When I think of all the things over the years I have not done because of one or the other, I could cry. 

Another demon in my personal pantheon of demons (pantheon is the wrong word, of course, but I am thumbing my nose at perfectionism by leaving it there and pressing on with my story) is what I will call, for want of a better term (see, I’m doing it again….God, this is exhilarating!) aspirational ADD.  Like so many of my generation, I continue dithering well into my forties about what I want to be when I grow up.  

I want to be a writer.  Yes.  Okay.  More than three years ago, I had a complete manuscript and a publisher waiting for it.  I was working on a final revision and shouldn’t have been doing anything else except the bare minimum required to care for my home and children until I got that package in the mail.  But I did do something else.  I let myself be talked into a major undertaking that kept me from finishing the book.  You think I’m insane.  You’re right.  Only all of us are kind of insane when it comes to letting our demons get in the way of our dreams, aren’t we?  If we weren’t, we’d all be where we wanted to be instead of where we are, right?