So, what’s with all the death stuff?  My last post, and the one before clearly delved into some very sad and dark places.  Every creative juice that flowed was in the form of tears.  And while I felt a sense of achievement by tapping into some real, raw emotion, it was becoming clear to me that I’d have to re title this blog…”Grown up girl’s lost her Prozac”

  In my real life, I never wear my heart on my sleeve.  Even in the most stressful, and unpleasant of circumstances, my expression is as flat as a  non stick frypan.  However, in my writing world, it seems my heart holds an enormous grey lead pencil, happy to blab all my angst out into  virtual space.  Not that I’m complaining.  A blog is a fantastic means of expression.  I did start to worry though that the writing that people were expecting to find here was becoming a bit bleak.  Maybe you’d stop coming back.  That a blog mutiny was afoot.   Perhaps I was about the walk the cyber plank, plunged into a virtual sea of oblivion. To drown amongst an ocean of unread blogs.   OK, stopping with the pirate metaphors (unless Captain Jack comes swashbuckling up the street, and then you guys are on your own!), but you get my (a)drift (sorry, that seriously was the last one!). 

So, what’s really been going on?  Well for a change, nothing drastic.  No hideous health diagnoses or marital upheaval.  There has however been a shift in my own sense of worth.  All my kids are off at school, and the MOTH, well he got a kick ass job, and moved away.  So now I’m left to wonder what my role in the world is gonna be?  Mum’s mother, and wifes are wifely and for the most part of my day I’m not required for either.  I’ve always craved my own time, and now it seems that my own company is not as stimulating as I thought it would be.

 A life of lunches and chatting with friends would be OK, but what have I got to offer?  Conversations about how I sat and didn’t move for three hours?  Enthralling stuff!   True a writers dream is to be left to write, but somehow it all seems more substantial and more of an achievement when you’re trying to squeeze creative moments into a lifetime of  playdates and committee meetings. 

So, it seems my nest is empty, which doesn’t bode well for the future, considering I’m only 36!  I don’t feel a part of anything anymore.  A tiny little atoll slowing being submerged as the polar ice caps melt.   Taking this  amateur phsychoanalysis  to its most obvious conclusion my writing is more about the death of self and less about the loss of a loved one.  To be more precise, I have lost a loved one…..me!,

Sounds a bit melodramatic I know, but hopefully now that it’s here, spilled across the page, I’ll be shamed into getting over myself and getting on with it!

Oh God, I wish I wasn’t writing all this now……………

 

Let me tell you something about myself.  I’m a deleter. I’m a deleter and a fixer.  Sometimes to fix I deleted.  It’s a handy combination.  The need to fix comes from my own inability to “sit” with a feeling of  being uncomfortable. I can’t stand to think people aren’t living their best life.  And to do that they need to be living a life more like mine. For a long timeI was a fixer because thought I was  better than all those other people who couldn’t get their shit together.  In reality I hate that feeling where the world is out of sync.  “Your problems make me feel bad, so now I must fix them and make the bad feelings go away!”  I suffered from a severe case of ego overload.  If I couldn’t fix I would erase.  This is an hereditary condition I have seen repeated for years. 

Recently a loved one posted a comment on a FB forum that upset me terribly.  My instinct was to retaliate.  I started typing several times.  Some responses were angry, others apologetic.  I was frantically trying to make what they said alright, so that I could be ok with it.  My next response was to remove myself from the situation completely, to never return to said forum.  To cease all contact.

In my franticness my world was spinning.  I had been caught completely off guard.  My heart was racing, my mind buzzing.  And then a new little voice piped up.  And I listened.  And then I got up from my chair, and I walked away, having done nothing.  I worried over this issue like a sore tooth.  Forgetting about it for a while, and then going back and giving it a poke.  I wanted to ring this person and challenge them on what they’d done, but knowing them too well, I knew it would only serve to make me feel even more worthless. 

So, I sat with the feeling, and when my husband returned after four weeks away, I sat with my head in his lap and sobbed.  He was a little bewildered I think.  It wasn’t the end of the world, but this person had broken my heart a little bit.

So, why tell you all of this?  Because some days I sit here at this computer and I want to delete everything I’ve written.  It’s not the content that bothers me, mainly my technique.  I want to fix or delete (probably the latter). I wonder who the hell I think I am expecting you all to come here and read my words of wisdom?  I don’t really have an answer to that , except to say that I don’t imagine one can evolve much as a writer if no one reads their work. 

So, I say thank you.  I will probably worry over this blog the most, but rest assured, I will not delete.  I will continue to sit and be uncomfortable safe in the knowledge that this is exactly where I want to be!

 

“There are two ways to slide easily through life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.”
Alfred Korzybski