I have now been away from the day job for a little over 2 months. During that time I was sick for 4 weeks. I also installed our native plant garden, front and back yard, worked more with training Cassie, finished up a bunch of work-for-hire projects, read some, worked on the budget 101 times, wrote a partial – the first 20 pages – of Flyboy for critique at an upcoming conference, and, oh yeah, did Christmas.
I felt like I was racing through each day to get to the next but with no master plan of where I really wanted to go. All of the sudden it is January and I am wondering where the time went.
Several people told me that after leaving the day job it would take a year to feel comfortable in my own skin again, a year to know where I wanted to go with my life. I didn’t understand it at first but now I do. I am racing less now, trying hard to be here, be now – to enjoy the moment. But I know I am not "there" yet.
I can feel my writer brain kicking on again. That might sound odd when I know that I have actually done a fair amount of writing in the past couple of months but this is different. Last night I was going through my books on the craft of poetry and found my pulse racing once more when I pulled Wishes, Lies and Dreams and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red, both by Kenneth Koch, off the shelf. I spent a few hours looking through old manuscripts and getting excited about some of the ideas. I opened my WIP and greeted it with joy rather than worries that I didn’t know what I was doing.
We are in horrible, crazy-making financial times. I haven’t sold a trade book in years. I’ve been out of the loop so much online that I have lost a lot of the networking that I had worked so hard to build up. Many people are filled with gloom and doom about the publishing business and yet. . .
I feel like a writer again. It is enough, for now.
I can feel my writer brain kicking on again. That might sound odd
It doesn’t sound odd to me at all. During the holidays, especially with visitors (boyfriend came from the UK), my writer brain tends to get shoved to the back, worried about all the stuff “here” and “now”. With him going home on Saturday, and the kids back in school from break, I can feel my own brain beginning to rev up and realise “Writing time off the port bow!” which is nice, even as I know I’ll be depressed.
It’s nice, isn’t it, to feel that part of us come back to life?
It took me at least a year to come to grips with being at home instead of at work (and with an autoimmune disease, no less – that took at least 3 or 4 years to get used to all on its own – I still have expectations that are too high, but feel as if they oughtn’t be.
Ugh! I still haven’t gotten used to the things going on with my body either. And I ALWAYS have expectations that are too high physically. It’s hard too, as I am sure you know, when people can’t see something that is wrong with you. They often draw the wrong conclusions.
I think having the crit chapters due and your teaching & those two writing jobs lined up was brilliant–you didn’t even have TIME to feel like you weren’t going to be writing. š
Well other than deciding at the last minute to do the crit chapters it was all accidental brilliance. LOL. But thank you.
Susan, I’m so glad you feel like a writer again. That is a lot. And we know you are. Always.
Thanks so much Jeannine.