Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Thought-swirl

I often over-think while lying in bed when I'm trying to sleep.
This usually happens on weeknights, when I'm trying to actively calm my mind. Instead of calming, I find my thoughts swirling--what I've written that day, what I've thought about persistently, what I want to write about.
I do it constantly.
Since I've started writing abougt narrative, and remembering that this blog was to be the springboard of this thing I want to write called a kind of reality-based "memoir" but base it in a fictional vein.
I know--this sounds crazy. Even writing it seems crazy. How will that work? Never mind--I know this isn't a project that is going to just 'happen' over night (while I toss in bed). It's going to take years.
Hell, it already has.
This blog has been what Natalie Goldberg so often says "Freedom to write the worst stuff in the world". For example, when I whine about work. Traffic. My (relatively okay) commute. Women who home-school. Women who home-school four kids. And write blogs about not wanting to see their friends anymore. That their kids and husbands come first. Let me tell you something ladies; that husband ditches you I'll point you in the direction you're gonna run. Hint: It's not your mother's house.
So that's what I mean about that. I need to get the scrums out of the way.

But there's another roadblock.
I absolutely despise thinking and writing about childhood. OR young-adulthood (I've already blogged about that, search the archives. I can't remember where exactly). I mean, I don't even like reading about OTHER writer's childhoods and young adulthoods. Confession time; I routinely SKIP OVER parts in memoir (or skim them, very very fast)  where writers go back to their childhood/adolescence. I literally squirm. I know what a writing teacher/therapist would say about this; that must be gold if it makes you so jumpy. But I don't agree.

So I will try to begin at my beginning, and maybe, if you will play along, you can be my guinea pigs on this weird journey, one where I try to remove the 'me' out of memoir. I know that there are still going to be days when I want to tune in and sound off on something. Or when I have a feeling that I need to get out or a worry that's been eating at me.

This week it's been a mixed bag. I've missed Mike furiously, I've worried about his kitchen-injury, and I've fretted over not being there, over not having a 'normal' marriage yet, where he and I live together all the time and get to come home from work and complain and listen and understand, instead of doing it over a long-distance line with dropped calls, and suppliers calling to make food deliveries (him) and me having a week where I feel completely unmotivated to do, well, anything, and as I re-trace my steps and realize that after I see him I'm even more empty with the life I'm parodying day after day I get really down.
Then I have this eleven-month anniversary (re; my dad) looming on Sunday, which is also Race Day, and that's been giving me twitches of sadness all week too. Factor in a pile of work and it's a recipe for becoming stuck.
I've been remembering (or rather, my memory has, I don't seem to have any control over it) those last few weeks last year. My dad and his note-writing. Snippets of those conversations. Not realizing how fleeting things would be, how quickly the last weeks would fly by, how I would cease to notice weather, how running would not affect me physically because I wasn't really in my body.
I guess that 's the challenge of this year. I'm back, fully 'real' and in some ways I just want to push it all away.  I guess that's what I'm doing when I lie on the couch for hours after work, eat leftovers, watch terrible tv out of the corner of my eye while reading a Stephen King book of stories.

Hoping for a better tomorrow.

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