I perhaps shouldn’t worry about seeming self-indulgent when I blog. I mean, there’s something inherently self-indulgent in keeping a blog in the first place, I think – at least a blog like this one, that exists to showcase things I’m thinking about. Just keeping a blog like this sort of implies right away that I think the contents of my head are worthy of public notice, right? I even named this blog after myself! (Though, in fairness, that’s more a result of how horribly bad and uncreative I am at coming up with titles for things than it is an indication of ego.)
But at any rate, I admittedly do try to write things here that I think other people might find interesting (even if it’s a post about something I did with my kids and the “other people” are basically only their grandparents!!) I do try not to spill the contents of my head. Some of this is for privacy’s sake – but some truly is because, really, who wants to read that??? So, it’s not my overt intention to be self-indulgent with my writing.
Of course, having said that, I’m now going to write a post that is probably of no interest to anybody (even my parents) – just myself. But I think it needs to be written, if only to bridge what has turned into quite a gap. I actually haven’t blogged anything (or written creatively…or written anything at all, save some stuff I had to write for work) since September 24th. That’s 47 days! Crazy.
I didn’t mean to let so much time pass – but I think, in hindsight, that I did let it pass at least semi-consciously on purpose. Life has moved so fast in the last two years (since my marriage busted up.) That time, two years ago, was like breaking out of a cocoon. (That sounds cliche, but it’s really what it felt like.) And life has been moving and moving and moving since then as I’ve been figuring things out, dealing with the past, trying to wrap my mind around the new future, etc.
Then, by necessity, I kind of stopped moving in the month of October. And I responded to that lack of movement by retreating into my own head a bit. And that just wasn’t conducive to writing – so I didn’t write at all.
It’s been a strange 47 days for me – and very busy. I expected moving to Ohio to be a little nutty, a little stressful, and sort of strange and different. I was moving in full-time to my parents’ house (where I technically already lived, but only part-time). And I was doing so with two kids, a big dog, and a recently out of work, not-quite-officially-ex-husband in tow. That’s not exactly a recipe for smooth sailing.
(Incidentally, I just finished re-reading a wonderful book about writing – and the double metaphor I just used in that last sentence is leaping out at me, having just read so much about language. Not leaping in a good way, either – but I’m too lazy to think of better phrasing right now!
Great book, if you get a chance to take a look. It’s geared for poets, but it’s useful for everybody. I for one am no poet, that’s for sure! But that book has helped me so much with my writing.)
But anyway, I expected a bit of turbulence when I moved into my parents’ house – but everything about my time there was pretty much entirely unexpected. Turbulent, absolutely. Pretty much entirely turbulent actually (no real downtime at all.) But the thing was, it wasn’t turbulent in the ways I expected – not at all. It was a strange month, actually. A lot of it was uncomfortable…but all of it was (in hindsight) good for me. The amount of time I spent in my head, for example, (escaping there) meant that I also found myself speeding down mental paths I was just tentatively thinking about previously. Life things, goals, personal things. This was a month of recalibration. I hadn’t realized I needed that – but I needed that.
I think sometimes it benefits you, if you care about writing and other forms of self-expression, to actually step away from them – just for a little while. To give yourself the chance to just live inside of yourself for a little while, inside of your own head, examining your own thoughts, privately. I don’t think that’s a healthy way to exist long-term: with the most meaningful things taking place in your own head, while the life in front of you is unsatisfactory. I’ve been there before (lived in that place for quite a long time, actually.) It’s definitely not good. But for a little while? It was useful to me.
And now I find that I’m ready to be writing again, suddenly. I seem to have a lot to say!
But there does feel like there needs to be some sort of blogging bridge between the before that is everything prior to October, and the after that is now. That’s this post, I guess.
So, what have I been doing for the last 47 days besides writing?
I’ve been:
1) Reading…a lot. Kate Christensen’s Trouble, Elizabeth Kostova’s The Swan Thieves, and Kim Addonizio’s Ordinary Genius I finished in their entirety, punctuated by bits of Leonard Cohen’s Book of Longing.
I’m actually in the process of re-reading Trouble now, as I inhaled it the first time. I want to read it more carefully and then blog about it (this is without a doubt one of my favorite books ever.) I’m also reading Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism Without Beliefs – which is a really interesting book I started a few years ago and for some reason never finished. It was so worth finding again and re-starting.
2) Moving…Adjusting…Moving again. And by “adjusting” I mean running interference. I expected this to some degree. But it actually didn’t happen in any of the ways I expected – and the ways it did happen were difficult in ways I never anticipated.
And then when my ex, with amazing and unexpected rapidity, landed another, better, job than the one he’d just left, it became all about scrambling. He needed to get back down to DC. But what about the kids? How were they going to spend any decent time with their dad when he had a new and more demanding job to acclimate to? How were we going to work this new scenario in the best, healthiest, most positive way for them?
He ultimately got a two-bedroom apartment – and one of the rooms is now earmarked as a “girls’ room” for me and my daughter to share; my ex and son meanwhile are sharing the “boys’ room.” I know it sounds weird on the surface, but so far this oddball semi-roommating thing is actually coming along swimmingly. (I have more to say, but this topic is easily a blog post of its own – or several of them. I’ll save any other thoughts for those!)
3) Retaining a Divorce Lawyer (after all.) We did finally decide to get a lawyer (having grudgingly admitted that we just can’t figure out this stupid paperwork on our own.)
Have I yet ranted on this blog about the inane-ness of just how EASY it is to get married (sign a paper…that’s pretty much it) and how ridiculously difficult and annoying it is to get divorced??? Especially when you have kids. I’m too tired to rant right now – and we finally got a lawyer to smooth things out, so it’s hardly worth it. I guess. But I could rant! I really, really, really could. (That could also be a post of its own…a LONG post.)
4) Researching Yoga Styles. I want for a variety of reasons to get serious about yoga in a way that I haven’t before – as in, I want to commit to a particular kind of practice and really work to excel within that framework. I really think that if I got good enough (admittedly a big “if”), teaching yoga would be something I’d enjoy doing. But I need to get much more knowledgeable, much more committed, much stronger, much more flexible, and many other things before I could ever think about anything like that, or gauge my capability for it. It’s fun to think about, though – and researching the ins and outs of the various styles of yoga has been really interesting.
5) Thinking and Thinking and Thinking. This post is getting long!! So I’ll just sum up this last point by saying that I’ve been thinking, thinking a LOT, about what being a “grownup” really means – and I’m realizing that it’s for me to define…and that my definition doesn’t match a lot of other people’s (and that I’m okay with that, and becoming more so.) I have a lot more to say about this (another future post!)
So anyway, that’s what I’ve been doing with myself.
