it felt impossible.

Between a dose of jet lag and one particularly nasty cold (J is kindly referring to my cough as an “old-man-death-rattle”) my sleep patterns have been wacky this week. That means that it's 6am and I’ve been up for about an hour and a half already. I tried to lull myself back to sleep, but instead wound up reorganizing my Pinterest boards on my phone, in bed, while Ratcat slowly tried to claim my entire pillow.

So I’m up, mercifully coughing a bit less this morning, and chugging a hot mug of my healing tea, only this time I’ve boiled it down into a near syrup that tastes like fire. After more than a week of vacation, there’s too much work waiting at the office (the kind with deadlines fast approaching), so I’m rallying the best I can to get my butt into my cubicle today.

We went on a vacation last week, which I realize I only barely mentioned in passing. It was the first time in four years that J and I have taken a vacation just for us. It was also his first time out of the country. I’m still digesting it, but I’ll have more to say at some point. It was wonderful, expansive, challenging, and definitely not relaxing (but we didn’t mean for it to be). When I sort the slew of knots in my brain, I’ll tell you more.

Leading up to the trip, I let myself succumb to being overwhelmed, which generally has more to do with my own state of mind than the actual circumstances of my life. I can always find something to feel overwhelmed about (anxious brains are excellent at that). While I felt overwhelmed, it felt impossible to write. I wish I had powered through, pushed through, but I didn’t. I gave in. So I haven’t done any freewriting in exactly 18 days. Writing that out now, it doesn’t seem so bad - there have been many much longer hiatuses in my history. But I’ve been writing more intensely in the past months than I have in a long time, or ever, so 18 days feels like……..I’ve been holding my breath? 

editing.

I have never been great at editing my own work, surprisingly, considering I work as a writer. Once the words in my head get onto the page, I have the urge to fling them off. I never want to look at them again. I want to forget that I was so bold, or foolish, as to take my thoughts and put them down for everyone to read. It’s not the most healthy feeling, and a little tricky to manage when writing seems to be your work.

Up until four or five years ago, I used to throw away everything I wrote. I would fill up notebooks, and bit by bit, I’d tear out the pages and throw them away. I blogged on and off, and usually wound up deleting the blogs shortly thereafter. The urge to write has always been there, but the courage to lay the writing bare and let others see it has not. That’s why the first rule of this blog, for my own sake, was:

I will not delete. Once I put it out there, it's out there. Yes, I am afraid that I'll sound stupid, silly or wrong. Well sometimes I am stupid, silly and wrong. I apologize now for being any of those things, but even still - I'm not going to delete it.

But I’m trying to stretch myself a bit further these days, trying to do something more than the rambling and freewriting. It is hard as hell. I keep telling myself that I will get better at it only by doing it, but its so easy to feel like it will never come out right, ever, because I don’t know what I’m doing. I have to suppress a lot of feelings in order to make myself reread and think critically about what I’m writing. Like I said, I’ve never been great at editing my own work.

That was the task in front of me today, and I’ve done an epic job of avoiding it. I made phone calls, I ran errands, I even resorted to an afternoon nap. So the day stretches into evening now, permeated by the blues because I’ve spent the entire day avoiding the thing I want to/have to/hate to do. But there’s still time left today.

on the horizon.

Tonight, I’m thinking about:
-the smell of roasting potatoes, in hot oil, in the oven
-how early I can reasonably “get in bed to read” (i.e. fall asleep)
-whether or not it would be weird/creepy to wear a ski mask at home to keep my nose warm

But mostly, I’m thinking about the potatoes. I tried to write for half an hour, hungry, while the potatoes roasted in the oven. I managed to write a random string of words with “potatoes” inserted every so often. Sometimes an evening needs to be simple and sometimes a comfort as simple as roasted potatoes can consume you.

I’m reading essays lately, and I generally love or hate them - I don’t often feel indifferent. I’ve read a handful that I loved, and two or three (including this one) that I’m still thinking about hours/days after reading. That helps me remember what writing can do.

J and I saw a play on Sunday night, mostly because we had free tickets, even though we were both tired from a weekend of travelling. When we walked in and I realized that the show was three hours long, I almost bailed. I’m so glad I didn’t. It was riveting and so well done that I’m still turning it over in my head.

We spent the weekend in the mountains, or near to them, and it felt good. I’m an ocean person forever, but I still love to breathe mountain air sometimes. A group of us tried to find a trail that was supposedly near a mountain lake, and after an anxiety-filled drive down a winding, icy road, we found…...no trail. But we did get a moment of beauty at the foot of the lakeshore.

And soon we’re leaving the country, just for a week, but on a real vacation, planned just for us. And then spring will be coming - flowers, sun, and change on the horizon.