work.

All my life I have moved away from places and never returned. Houses and schools and streets become faded, blurry, then mythic and dreamlike. I don’t know that I even want to go back to disturb their perfection. Once I got the idea to pull up the street view on Google Maps for a street I lived in on when I was 11 years old. There was a corner with a shady hotel and a man who sat out front and sang, and there was a sour-smelling Chinese restaurant that we never ate at. I pulled up the street view and everything looked so small and artificial - not at all how I remembered.

But Wellfleet is something different. I lived here for three years, and I left, but somehow this place has got inside of me. The mythic and the dreamlike mix with the reality. I leave and come back, and leave and come back. I’m not blind to its imperfections, and I know why I left. But I can’t stop coming back. Right now it feels like I’m here, and I’m not here, and I’m on vacation, and I’ve never left. I can’t even attach a word to the feeling, some complicated mixture of homesickness and loneliness and familiarity and relief. I have the space I need here, space inside my own head.

I have been writing, though not as much as I mean to, and not here. Last month was emotional and heavy. I spent my time being anxious about work and moving, or trying not to be anxious about work and moving. As always, my worries accomplished nothing, and I’m on the other side, and everything seems so clear and simple now. And now I’m in Wellfleet, and I have work to do.

chaos.

I’m awake right now, and writing here, because I can’t fall asleep. I can’t fall asleep because I found a cockroach in the kitchen, and although it isn’t my first, I am still wildly afraid of them. So I’m waiting for J to come home and inspect all the cupboards for me so that I can fall asleep and not dream of cockroaches marching into my bed.

Our apartment was broken into last week, and while I know rationally that it won’t happen again, that the reasons it was possible for someone to get in have been fixed, it just occurred to me that I haven’t tried to fall asleep here alone since that happened.

Our schedules (really, J’s schedule) can be wacky. I wake up early. Rehearsals and shows and meetings tend to happen late at the theatre, so J often works late. When I first moved here, it took some adjusting - being alone often at night, eating dinner alone, sometimes going a week or more only seeing each other for a few minutes. It isn’t ideal, but also plenty of people manage worse. There are people who work actual night shifts, or people who are deployed, or are on call. We manage.

holy hour.

I’m testing out this idea of a “holy hour” that I learned about here, but I guess it originally comes from Robin Sharma, a self-help/productivity guy that I know nothing about. But being who I am, I love schedules, routines, and personal challenges. The last few days I’ve only managed a holy fifteen minutes, but this morning I’m pulling off forty-five, which feels like I’m on the right track.

The idea, at least as far as I see it, is to divvy up that hour between exercise, learning, and writing about goals. I’ve been doing it between stretching, reading a book, and writing about anything I want. It’s a mini creative/personal growth day embedded in the normal routine of the day. I like it.

I really petered out on my original challenge this year of reading a chapter of Writing Down the Bones every day, and then writing from it. I’m about halfway through. All it comes down to is momentum - when we went on vacation, I let it slip, and I lost the months of winding up.

It is disturbingly similar to the feeling of not wanting to run. I paced around the house for nearly half an hour after work last night, debating whether I was going to run: do I feel like it? do I have time? is there anything else I need to do? etc. etc. It’s all brain games and monkey mind. Somewhere in Writing Down the Bones (or probably in many places), Goldberg says to let your brain continue with whatever wacky thing its doing, but tell your body to keep going through to the physical action. Pick up the pen and notebook, sit down, start scratching the pen across the surface. It’s a physical act, just like putting on running clothes, finding my headphones, walking out the door. Tell your body go and then let it go.

There’s the bell, friends. Its time to make breakfast and pack my bag and get on with the other day. But this is good, isn't it?

why?

Enough, friends. Here’s to the dance I hate, the one where I don’t write and don’t write and don’t write until it feels absolutely impossible, and also the ONLY THING THAT CAN SAVE ME. The heat from the winter writing frenzy still feels fresh and nearby. It feels like that was a few weeks ago that I was writing like mad, but it was three months. It’s amazing how time unmarked by intention can be so fleeting, and also so forgettable.

But I’m not here to whine and complain about myself and my weak sense of ambition, which I could easily do. As always, I have my reasons for doing what I do (and not doing what I…..don’t do). Including writing. Blah blah blah. WHATEVER. I’m writing now today here and the future is ahead of us.

So much change is on the horizon, it makes me dizzy - and also excited and hopeful. I’m thinking about:

-the person you are vs. the person you try to project
-finding the sparks
-being spontaneous
-being honest
-being transparent
-being sensitive (and being cool with it)

I also really really love the sentiment that women should refuse to wear shoes they can’t walk a mile in.

steam.

Everything feels off limits right now. Things need to be written about, but they can't be written, or I can't write them. A friend told me last week that I'm a private person. I know this, but I also forget. I so value the transparent, genuine people in my life - I forget that I am not always like that myself.

I think about all the creators - the people who choose to make something out of their lives and experiences. We put a slab of ourselves on display. We sing it, we write it, we paint it, we draw it, we photograph it. Private and public mix. But so often, at least in my experience, these creators can be intensely private people. Still, something inside stirs them to use their private lives as some sort of fuel for their art.

I went through a brief phase where I thought I wanted to write songs. I didn't think I was going to be a musician or anything like that, but I felt strongly that the best way I could express myself was by writing rhyming lyrics and putting them to a tune. I wrote a handful of mediocre-to-bad songs that I strummed out alone, on a guitar, late at night. Incidentally, most of these songs were tied to heartbreak, which has a way of bringing out the mediocre poet in all of us.

I can't tell you where this is going. I haven't been writing and its making me feel crazy. Its making me think of terrible analogies to describe my crazy feelings (which I have written and deleted just now). Its making my shoulders tight and my fists balled up and I can't sleep and when I do have crazy dreams filled with alligators and college acquaintances. So I decided to show up here tonight and let out some of that steam.

More to come, friends. Big things, too.