Cake, Strawberries and a Thing

Warning:  soft underbelly exposed.

I’ve been having a hard time lately.

No surprises there.  The extended radio silence gives it away, doesn’t it?

Not that my life is bad, or even difficult.  I’m fully able to load up on the gratitude when I’m feeling down. (Feeling thankful helps enormously when you’re sitting in some vinyl chair while they prepare the sharp, pointy instruments they’re about to start poking in to you).

No, this distress is more of the lingering, mid-life, existential kind. 

Basically the things I want to do are clashing with the Thing I really want to do.  I have the opportunity to complete a degree in my chosen field, with excellent advanced standing points and tax deductions.  But at the same time I’m on fire with the notion of embracing my writerness, which I have always suspected was my Thing.  And it’s more urgently my Thing, now that I’ve faced off the biological mutiny of cancer and am now staring down (or flinching at) my 40^th birthday.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m all for having my cake and eating it too.  A healthily functioning person should be able to work part-time, study a single subject, and squeeze in a number of hours pursuing their Thing each week, while still maintaining a small amount of social contact. 

But I struggle. 

Sadly, it’s not about how many hours there are in a day, but when my brain function will give out.  Some days my stupified brain is so tired from my short day at work, I collapse in the early evening.  I make short term goals and then forget what they were.  Hell, sometimes I even forget what day it is. 

This makes time management an ongoing nightmare. Let alone when you can’t decide what your top priority is or even remember what it was you were doing.

Right now in fact, I should be feverishly reading and scribbling notes, in an effort not to fail not one but two uni subjects.  And yet…

And yet, here I am.  Doing this self-indulgent, possibly not-completely-mentally-healthy Thing.  Looking within.  Writing.  Sometimes I believe this is the best possible Thing I can be doing, and other times I fear that maybe it’s a sign of the pathological in me.  Particularly since I haven’t yet organised myself to write fiction.

See, I’m afraid to admit to the world the extent to which I really, really do not have it together.  While I appear to function on the outside, really I’m quite unstable.  I require a lot of shoring up.  For a long time that illusion was easier to create.  But now, with my cracked brain and my tired body, it requires a greater investment of time and energy.  I’m not able to shore myself up quite so flawlessly as I have in the past. I’m afraid of leakage, most especially in my writing.

But if I don’t write, I’m afraid the whole dam will break open.

It’s a risky business.  If I were to wade out past my psychological untidiness and write, I might find out that I’m terrible at it.  Or worse than terrible, mediocre.  And publicly so.

I tried this writing Thing once before.  I got as far as the third semester in a professional writing course, and faltered.  Part of that falter was the pressing need for a more practical income stream.  And part of it was that I caught the first glimpse that maybe I’m not as smart/talented/imaginative as everyone thought I was.  There needs to be a painful stage of being not-very-good but persisting anyway until I’ve clocked up some real skill.  This means sucking up the hideous embarrassment of exposing my soft not-perfectness, and just doing it.

So I didn’t.  I didn’t do it.  I wriggled away and found something else that would earn me money and allow me to shine, in tiny safe amounts.  But writing didn’t stop being my Thing.  It quietly gnawed away at my insides for nearly a decade, and finally clawed its way out again, probably through one of the holes made by surgical steel.

So here I am again.  Tired, and with a brain and body full of holes, wrestling with a Thing that surprises me with deep joy and even deeper struggle, that won’t go away.  And the Thing is competing with that other part of my life, the moving-forward with the tidy plans I made before cancer came along and fucked it all up.  Throw in some semi-menopausal mood swings, and I’m a joy to live with.

So, this is the hard time I’m been having.  Stuck.  Blocked.  Avoidant.  Bleak.  Resentful of the work needed for the choice that I’ve made and the energy that it consumes. 

On Friday, I was having a particularly bad day, vacillating between I’ll never be a real writer and I’ll just have to drop out of Uni, then.  While ruminating on the nature of success and failure, something twigged.  I realised it’s all in your state of mind.  OK, so maybe I don’t have the time and capacity right now to launch my entire psyche into the deep end of a novel while cranking out High Distinctions each semester, but I can – and I have in the past – find that still spot right in the middle where everything balances.

I can chew that particular cake, and still have it.  And the secret?  A willingness to boldly allow my imperfection, to let the cake to sit lopsided on the plate while it makes room for the strawberries.  Suddenly I can see a path through, one that will allow me to plod along and complete what is needed, but still give my Thing room to breathe and sometimes even dance.

And, at that very moment of decision, of inner shift, I look up.  A rainbow.  And not just any rainbow. It’s searing against the dusk tinged sky, a wide arc of intense light reaching from one side of the sky all the way to the other.  As I drive home, it continues to dazzle in the north east, in the direction I am travelling.

I know it’s only an accident of light and water vapour.  But it seems like a promise.  A reassurance that there will be illumination along the path, if I let my true colours shine, reach wide for what is beautiful, and steer towards my goals with clarity.