Dry Spell

Morning pages the last few weeks are marked by a sort of increasing desperation, if you can have a desperation of apathy… that nothing seems worth writing about, that no ideas are coming, that the whole exercise seems pointless and frustrating and a waste.

Not that there haven’t been similar dry spells. This is six years of a habit, one that has seen me through adjusting to having a third child and then a fourth, from feeling every moment of my day is devoured by a baby’s needs to feeling entitled to a certain amount of quiet each day when they are in school. I have talked myself through the growing discomfort of day after day of abortive ideas, feeling deep doubt about what on earth I think I am doing. I know to answer myself with all of the patter from the stack of books on my shelves professing to be about the craft and practice of writing, about my obligation being to show up, that the habit makes room for when the ideas do show up. Other dry spells have been followed by periods when the insights and ideas and sheer deliciousness of the words seem hardly to fit between two pasteboard covers. But such days don’t come if I just give up and walk away from it all right now.

Still. It feels like punishment. Punishment for being arrogant back when Dana directed me to the Elizabeth Gilbert TED Talk, for being all “yeah, yeah, yeah, she’s clever and funny and likable, but all that about ‘it’s just your job to show up willing to write not, judge it or take it all too personally, think you’re all responsible for it’? everyone knows that.” Punishment for some lack of compassion, for being half-present to the kids, for being so arrogant as to establish a habit that is, frankly, doing little for me lately except making me irritable and frustrated with the house, with the kids. It carries over, nothing feels right for the blog.

Gilbert is talking about the fears and anxieties attendant on writing. I don’t know if I have the self-knowledge to identify the fear going on here. That this feeling will never go away?

__________

And a dream. I have had vivid recall of dreams lately, and even though I honestly believe I know exactly one person capable of recounting dreams in an interesting way and that for the rest of us, relating dreams should be, if not illegal, at least blanketed in caveats, this one still seems pertinent.

It was one of those dreams where I am back in college, defined less by actual classes than the sort of institutional living, long corridors and beds with grey wool blankets. And somehow at this point in my life — the point, maybe where two life paths diverged, the me that was to become a housewife somehow got to be in touch with the me who was going on to be a brilliant academic and poet. And our communications became the focus of my life, I looked forward to them, and I admired this other self so desperately, her intelligence, her way with words her confidence and unwavering assuredness. And somehow — I don’t know if it was an imbalance, but it started affecting my life. Returning from a visit home, the airplane I was a passenger on lost power, this great hulking bird gliding into grey mist, and I sat, strangely fearless, watching the lights flicker and go out. And then the connection started manifesting as a wasting disease, medical tests showed my blood thinning. The man I was dating was angrily worried about me, and there was a point in the dream when I didn’t have the strength to make it down one of the long corridors by myself, but was leaning heavily on him. And yet, alone in my room, the first thing I did was re-establish the connection. We were doing a sort of chat on my computer, but because of the interdimensionality of the whole thing, if we both typed at once our messages would cancel each other out, so we learned to each use only half a screen. I did realize I was going to have to make an unfair choice between living and this cherished other self, but the weaker I got, the stronger she was, to where she could enter my reality and flip the pillows over, noting the different arrangement of the beds in my room. And this is where I woke up rather than dream my own death.