I've been quiet for a couple of weeks, which is a little uncharacteristic of me. I was really sick with a nasty upper respiratory thing, and I started a new job. It's a part-time thing while the kids are in school, boring as hell, but it helps cover the cost of Muchness and Light.
There's also been a lot of emotional turmoil for several weeks. There's a lot going on with me and in me and around me. The first anniversary of Muchness and Light came and went on November 25th. I intended to mark it with a special blog post, but I was caught up in the Thanksgiving holidays and all of the internal drama.
I put away my fiction rewrites, again, until a better time and started on a much more personal project a few weeks ago. I'd been writing a lot, consistently, through everything going on. As is so often the case, writing is cathartic for me; I am sometimes surprised as what I find emblazoned across the screen while I'm trying to work through something. Honestly, I've been afraid to write, fearful of the truths I might learn about myself and my situation, apprehensive of what choices it might lead me to make.
There have been so many ups and down over the last year, the last six months in particular, and I'm a little weary. The scales have been swinging wildly from one heavy weight to another, and I needed some time to let them just stop, to find a balance and let that be. I needed some time for everything to just be still, both in me and around me.
It's incredibly difficult for me to be still. I'm a kinetic person, and I like to be constantly moving forward. Even if I'm in retrograde, I find comfort in knowing it's part of a longer-term forward motion. And this stillness, this constant central balance, is the kind of happy medium that feels so impossible to me. It usually takes me a long time to find what others call a happy place, where things are happening on both sides of the equation. I know that's how life is supposed to be, in the end, but staying in check is boring and unnatural for me.
So I had to make a conscious decision to be still. I had to make the concerted effort not to tip the scales in one direction or the other. I don't know how to do that. I don't know how not to be in motion. And writing felt like it might cause ripples and tremors that could ultimately undermine this effort, sending minute shockwaves down the beam and across the pans, shifting me one way or the other.
Right now, I'm weighing my own trepidation against my deep, visceral need to write. DH asked me recently what makes me happy, and I immediately answered, "Writing." It's something I need to do, as much as I need to eat and sleep and breathe. Even if no one else ever sees what I'm doing, it's something that just has to happen, regularly, for me to clear my own head and find my own insights.
There's a book I've referenced before, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, by David Bayles and Ted Orland. I go back to this book a lot when I'm questioning myself as a writer, uncertain as to whether or not what I'm doing is worthwhile--to me, to you, to anyone:
In the end it all comes down to this: you have a choice (or more accurately a tangle of choices) between giving your work your best shot and risking that it will not make you happy, or not giving it your best shot -- and thereby guaranteeing that it will not make you happy. It becomes a choice between certainty and uncertainty. And curiously, uncertainty is the comforting choice.
In the end, I know my scales won't be in balance for very long. I have decisions to make and paths to forge. I will almost certainly choose the path of uncertainty, finding some excitement in understanding the experience of the unknown. Through all of that, I will write. I will find my understandings by letting what's in my head come out through my fingertips. I hope that I will be surprised by the things I find there, on the virtual page.
I don't know if what I find will make me happy or unhappy, comfortable or discomfited. I can't see that far ahead right now, I'm trying hard not to push past the fog and make inferences about the future. But the process itself will bring its own comfort, its own sort of balance against my emotional upheavals.
So I'm back, and I'm working. A year later, I'm definitely a much more muchier version of myself. I'm trying to let that muchness rest and regain its strength, to guide me forward toward the next phase of Stephanie. I'm moving slowly, very carefully, so as not to tip my scales as dramatically as I have in recent months. But even if I can't see the sights edging slowly past me, I can feel the kinesis of it all, reverberating gently inside me, pulsing deeply in time to my own heart.
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