Killing Me Softly

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. ~Sylvia Plath

My online writing course is killing me! While I love writing as much as I do eating, dreaming among other weird things that I love doing, they too, like everything else, require time and attention and focus (yes, dreaming requires intense concentration!), and I'm generally short on all three. You might think that a "domestic engineer" like myself, would probably spend her afternoons watching re-runs of Desperate Housewives or perhaps taking down recipes on the cooking channel. WRONG! There's so much other chores to do in this house and knowing me, I'd want the house to be spotless and dust free which is probably why I mop the floors 3 times a day putting other desperate housewives to shame! At this rate, even Bree Van Der Kamp would be jealous of me! At one point, my husband came back home and said that the kitchen was in a mess and I spent half a day working on that tiny squalid kitchen of mine till it gleamed with perfection! You see, I don't handle criticism well these days, nor have I ever for that matter. Don't even get me started if he starts criticizing the way I dress. He now takes his meals through a feeding tube. Hehehee.....

Seriously, none of the work I have to do is technically difficult or unrealistic yet I manage to overwhelm myself anyway. A lot of it is me feeling like a complete failure, coupled with my ongoing battle with writers block which comes visiting every time I attempt in writing a post or even completing my assignment. My husband even bought me a pretty "little" notebook three stories thick which he thinks might come in handy should an idea hit me when I'm outta the  house or waking up in the middle of the night full of ideas on what to write. I'm now bestowed with 3 notebooks and I don’t even know where the hell it is! Did I tell you that I'm also a scatter brain? Yup, I’m a self confessed scatter brain. "A giddy or thoughtless person; one incapable of concentration or attention" as defined in Merriam- Webster.

This is just not my world and I feel like an outsider, a loser who can’t get any shit done. That doesn't help. I'm not immersed in this stuff, because the truth is, my course, my personal life are all more important to me. I keep telling myself that I'm doing the right thing, that this stress will be worth it in a couple of months, but meanwhile, it's just another thing that's killing me. Will I get there fast enough?

And finally, there's my personal life. That's killing me about as much as anything else. I can't even properly explain this, as nothing is actually "wrong." Even so, these last couple of months have felt important in a not-very-clear way (and yeah, that lack of clarity doesn't help). I've sensed some things crystallizing in me, and while it feels really, really good to know exactly where I stand on some important things, that somehow carries its own uncertainties. At the same time, I've been realizing how some things are really, truly fluid, and I am not able - nor would it be right of me - to act on any of it. This is a hard lesson for me; once I scrutinize something to its death, I am almost always compelled to act. And in the past, acting - in haste, out of pressure, because I just feel like awareness compels action - has proven lethal. To stand back and let things unfold -- this is a difficult lesson for me.

I've also realized that a lot about my personal life is not right now, anyway - in my hands, and letting go in this way, this feeling like I don't have all the control in my own life -- it basically kills me. Of course, I get that when the time comes to act, when everything's as unfolded as it's going to get, I may be up against some big, serious shit. And yeah, a lot of my stress is because of that. Life right now is not on a clear path.

Crap bunches up like this sometimes, and the stress is nearly unbearable. Ay. I need some light in this tunnel right about now...and super fast!