I hit my breaking point. Friday was it. Then Saturday. And finally Sunday.
I can’t remember too much of Friday. I know work ended, I laid back on my massaging chair, the only real semi-comfortable piece of furniture up here in my office. And I let it run the full body massage with heat, since it was chilly this weekend. The cycle lasts for about an hour I think, and I had the TV on and dozed to it. Erin called up at some point to make sure I was no longer working (I tend to go past my quitting time often). The chair stopped a couple of minutes later, so probably a forty minute nap, which is healthy.
I don’t normally do healthy.
I went downstairs and I can’t quite recall what we did, but I know that by the time I looked at how late it had gotten, it wasn’t far from midnight, and i just didn’t feel like coming upstairs and “faking it” with the writing. So I made my general concession on Facebook that I was officially breaking my streak. And I was okay with it.
Saturday I got some things done that needed it. I did a couple loads of dishes. I made the tacos I’d been hoping to get to all week. I talked to Levi on the phone for a couple of hours. And then I was making cookies at three o’clock in the morning. It was day two of not writing, but in for a penny…
It was also really easy to not write.
Sunday was harder. Both Saturday and Sunday I had the onset of my autumn seasonal headaches. A mix of tension and sinus, plus the addition of allergies. On Saturday I’d taken meds to get through it, but Sunday I hadn’t slept nearly long enough after the cookie baking, so I wound up crawling into bed in the early afternoon and didn’t wake up until nearly eight at night. I did one load of dishes (my entire life is doing dishes in a small, but wonderful countertop dishwasher), ate leftover tacos for the second time that day (but this time as a quesadilla, which is the best of both of my worlds). I watched a bit of a Netflix series because I had nothing else really compelling to watch.
Oh, but before my nap, I did read the story I was planning to rewrite for NaNo (or whatever). And I had a problem… I kind of liked it. Not just I liked the idea enough to re-approach it again a couple of years later. I mean I found it had some actual charm there, and was better composed (in my normal word vomit fashion) than I’d remembered it being. This doesn’t sound like a bad thing, I guess. But it’s easier to tear something apart when you can focus on all that it’s missing. It’s hard when it’s something that you actually kind of like. I’m like this with The Lawn Bard too. I love the story, I know it could be better, but what’s there is sort of precious to me. It also has a lot of love from Erin, both of my moms, a couple other people. I don’t want to rip it apart and potentially lose what works there. But I’m not sure that what is there is enough to allow it to move out of my hands and into that of a larger audience.
I’m aware that a lot of this could be the fear of trying to get better than I am. It could also be laziness. Not trying at all is lazy, in my mind. But it might also be seen as a little bit lazy to be resting on ideas I’ve already had instead of pushing myself to do something altogether new. I’m still not in a place where ideas are coming to me. I don’t know what that’s going to take.
So Sunday I didn’t write. And I won’t say it was as easy, but getting to the end of the night in such a short time made it feel less important. Like, “Well, it’s already time for bed, really, even if you napped most of the day away.” Erin checked in on me to see if I was okay. As in was I emotionally okay. And I’m not, and I think that’s pretty obvious. But other than work stress and the normal things that have taken up residence in my headspace like someone on Hoarders, I can’t pinpoint any one thing. It’s the same things. It’s the same stuff, over and over. And if I’m not seeking help to figure out what to do about it, I can’t really complain too much that this is what my life and my thoughts are now.
But it was three days and no writing. After twenty-something of trying to build a habit, I don’t love how easy it is to give it up. It’s just as easy, maybe easier, to make a habit of not doing something. That seems to be my nature actually. So, while I’ve still got several minutes of work left, with nothing to actually do, I am here, making sure I’m getting something down today. It will be one of these, “Me complaining about my life, blathering on about mostly nothing” posts. But it’s not a total reset. It’s better than not writing anything at all.
Still wish it was more.
