I feel that I have bad writing habits carried over from school years; the most egregious, of course, is trying to force my writing to a close, wrap it up in a bow by the end of the show sort of closing. End on a high note! End on a call to action! Close with a hook! I can hear my old professors whispering in my ears. I had this argument with them then, and I have it with myself now–life just doesn’t tie up neatly in a thousand words or less. It doesn’t wrap up in hundreds of thousands of words, else why would we have libraries and libraries of books full of people wrestling with the human existence?

Such is the argument in my head as I consider what I wrote last week.

Perhaps my second egregious habit is to constantly and consistently self-censor, and not speak the whole truth, for fear of offending someone or being disliked or be called out- whatever the reason might be that day. I am heavily resisting the urge to delete what I wrote. It feels a bit too much like a ‘essay for a grade’ writing, but I will let it stand.

A reader’s comment jogged my memory as to what I really wanted to say, and so here, I will attempt to reconstruct my inner dialogue instead and leave the editing for another day.

How do you keep your sense of self when everything that defines you keeps rapidly changing?

How do you hold on to the dreams you have when you’ve almost forgotten how to dream?

I’m not really sure.

I have watched many aspects of myself die- aspects that I never would have dreamed I’d be forced to let go of, that I thought would have to be pried out of my cold dead hands. And oh, how I’ve grieved.

Sometimes I just feel completely hollowed out.

I have an extremely odd sense of time dilation now, and it makes me not trust my memory of situations (a common side affect of trauma, I’ve come to learn). I mean, yeah, we all joke that the 90s were only ten years ago, but my memory of time is really distorted. Things that I swear happened a year ago happened four, five, six years ago. I will look up from a situation I’ve been dealing with thinking days have gone by, only to discover it has been weeks or months. (I apologize publicly here for so many emails that have sat unanswered- I’ll get to it tomorrow-only to realize that when tomorrow came, a month or two later, the whole need for a reply has long gone past. )

You can imagine the affect on my relationships. So many friendships have fallen away over the years, and I don’t particularly blame the friend; I blame the fact that my attention has been so diverted by what we’ve been going through. It is the rare, patient person that can continue to keep checking in on me when I go utterly quiet and understand the reason I’ve disappeared has nothing to do with them and everything to do with the weight of our life.

So when it comes to dreams and goals…gosh. I don’t fit in your standard paradigm at all. I’ve found a lot of standard advice about goal setting to be utterly useless. And that is only worsened since I’ve been diagnosed. I will complete XYZ by X date just does.not.work. at all for me. What I have come to realize though, is that the process is the goal, at least for me. It’s the routines. Prior to all this, I tended to be both very free-spirited and whimsical, but also very perfectionistic. I’d probably not start on something if I couldn’t do it the way I wanted to, right then, from start to finish. So so many things languished under this paradigm, and projects and goals never, ever got accomplished.

When all the medical stuff cascaded in, there was just a period of desperately trying to keep head above water. There’s nothing left for anything else. But now, farther down the road from all that, I’m realizing my dreams and goals happen in God’s own timing so long as I just show up. And when I gaze back over the last two to three years, I am honestly amazed at some of the things I’ve managed to accomplish, at least as pertains to creating art, because not one of them happened because I said “I’m going to make THIS.” with intention. They happened in tiny bits and pieces over days and weeks, one mark at a time, a journey of- ‘well what happens if I do this next?’

This has taught me to trust the rhythm and routine, which my formerly free-spirited self still balks at, to be honest. I want to just dance in and out with the muse and not be tied down. But every single thing I’ve produced lately hasn’t been like that at all- it’s this- I’ve got ten minutes, I’m going to do this one thing and if it works, great. Walk away. It doesn’t. Oh well. Walk away. Interestingly, some of the stuff I walked away from swearing it wasn’t working, I’ll come back to in the next pocket of time and go now wait a minute, what if… and something wholly new and wonderful emerges.

I guess what I’m saying- because I think this is a pretty widely held feeling right now as the pandemic shifts and we return to ‘normal’, but nothing feels even the slightest bit normal and it’s leaving us feeling disconnected and discombobulated, maybe even dis-integrated- ONE, that’s a normal feeling after such an experience (at least from where I’m standing, after what I’ve gone through)- and TWO- trust the process of who you are to pull all those pieces back to you. They are going to be very different, and you might not even remotely resemble the person you were before, but that’s okay. Trust the process. Trust the discipline of routine. Keep making the bed. Keep drinking that favorite drink. Keep lighting a candle every time you get to work. Keep your prayer rule. Whatever it may be, lay your goals down on the rails of that routine, and I can attest that you will be mighty surprised just how far down the track they might carry you, even when you swore you weren’t accomplishing anything. This becomes that much more true if you are ill for any length of time. Energy becomes such a precious commodity and it is so hard to spend energy if you can’t see a return. How I know this feeling! But trust that whatever you can spend will pay off. But it won’t pay at all if you never start it or you wait for the world to stop changing around you or the storm to pass- if you do that, you’ll be waiting a very, very long time, and you’ll be even farther from that dream.

How about you? Are you a big goal-setter and list- maker? Free spirit? What have you learned in your own life? I’d love to hear.

My goodness. It is October 15.  The school year took off without me! It has been such a helter skelter month and a half that I feel as if I am just now coming up for air and just barely at that. All that margin I thought we had built in to our days was apparently the teasing placidness of summer break talking.

Needless to say some things need adjusting.  So let’s check in, shall we?

Things we did well in September:

Um. We held on for dear life. HA!

I think, the success I see in September is that those rhythms we’ve really built in to our family culture held somehow over this last month. We ended September relatively right-side-up even though no one had really had any time to think about or put towards those rhythms. They just held. We are consistently praying together and reading aloud together as a family just about every night, which has been a huge goal for a long time, and I wondered if it would hold during this new season. It has. Our kitchen/dinner/meal planning routine held, relatively speaking, and that in itself was a wonder to me, as I didn’t feel like I had any brain space to devote to it.

Laughably, the second two of my goals for September, keep pounding away at the medical bills and more art, more art, more art barely blipped the radar. I had no idea what was coming around the bend when I wrote that.

As seems to be a constant in our lives, lately, we had a series of breaks. James’ car, which has been quite literally limping for nearly a year, had another catastrophic failure. We had to devote all of our financial margin to get it back to some useable form. It seems to be a constant measuring for us with so many of our large appliances/tools as to whether to finally scrap it and go without or attempt limping some more. We couldn’t find any more of a workable solution for the financial margin available than the reality we already had, so it limps along and lives to fight another day. We keep having things break for no other reason than perhaps to frustrate us: our lawn mower, most of our large appliances (save the oven and dishwasher, which were finally replaced around Christmas time last year), sometimes even just the simplest things…it feels a bit perverse!

It has been a lesson in taking deep breaths and just living with the reality. It’s hard in this culture of ours, but it’s necessary.

I’m thinking here of our lawn (and recalcitrant lawnmower(s), yes-plural- we have three, only one of which *sort of* works) which has been at all levels of shorn and meadow-like and half-hacked throughout the summer. Our side and front gardens have completely gone to weeds multiple times this summer, only to be weeded back to presentable-ness, only to get completely out of hand again. We live in your typical suburban has a home-owner’s association and perfectly manicured, cared for by professionals green lawns neighborhood. A lot of the owners are middle-aged or retired. They have expectations, is what I’m saying. And we can’t do a thing about it. We do what we can, when we can.

Just this last weekend, James was able to somehow-rig the sort-of-working lawnmower enough to start again, and we set to work with a vengeance, all of us older ones, each taking turns. The back yard was nearly a foot long, the front, about half that. I started in on the back yard late in the afternoon, got about four rows in, and then…OUCH. ouch. OUCH. ouch. Glance down, and then, as calmly as possible and as quickly as possible, get out of the back yard. I had run over a yellow jacket nest that had somehow established itself in the three weeks we couldn’t get the lawn mower to work. They were so angry. I got nailed, twice, and I think it was only by God’s grace that it wasn’t much, much worse. My body was working faster than my brain for once, and I was moving before I even realized I needed to move, if that makes sense. Needless to say, a decent sized patch of the back yard remains un-mowed until we figure out how to wisely deal with the yellow jackets. I was so angry when it happened- though that might have been the adrenaline talking- but I was just so frustrated that we just couldn’t, for just once, get the yard mowed all the way. And I couldn’t even walk the rest of the day. OH, how I stewed! But maybe it was the Bendadryl haze, or the prayers, or the sleep, but the next morning, I couldn’t stop laughing and rolling my eyes at how ridiculous and perverse this stuff has been, and a bit of an awed laugh of grateful thanks that the Lord preserved my life! It could have been a thousand times worse! It could have been James, and I would never have been able to get to him in time.

James can’t go near it- he is life-threateningly allergic. It would be suicide for him to try…which leaves me. And I don’t know how to ‘fix it’. So we have to figure it out. And it’s yet another thing…another smudge and besmirch on our standing in the neighborhood. They don’t know our lives though. And I’ve learned to just shrug and get back to work. Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. I understand that it a pretty profound way now. The lawnmower is just the last in a long, long train of lessons.

Sometimes you can’t fix or change things. Sometimes what is, just IS. 

Which leads to the third goal, more art, of which there has been precious little. I had wanted to launch a new collection on September 15. It is now October 15. I have serious doubts that it will arrive on Nov 15, but that’s my new re-set goal. I did, somewhat for my own sanity, jump on the #inktober2018 challenge wagon over on IG, only to promptly fall of said wagon due to more pressing concerns. I have serious doubts there will be much of it in October. It just isn’t in the cards for me right now. For some reason, September to December are always my absolutely nuttiest months, and it’s time for me to recognize and embrace that and stop trying to shoe horn more stuff into it.

Things I’d like to focus on in October:

Erm, October’s half gone at this point.

I think my main focus has to be on a bit of weeding. None of us in the family are happy with the current state of margin, so we’ve got to weed back until we feel like we’ve got the proper amount of breathing room. I hate that it takes me nearly a week to read/respond to emails, the sort of administrative side of being a homemaker and homeschooling mom type things. I can’t think straight, and that’s a bit problematic. When I don’t have enough time to brain dump and plan, that’s when I really start making mistakes. Costly mistakes. Easily avoidable mistakes. So yeah- MARGIN. That’s my goal for the last two weeks of October.

Things I’ll leave behind:

GLUTEN. *cough*laugh*cry*laugh*cough* Guess who was diagnosed with Celiacs in September? Yours truly. I was already pretty decently gluten free but would often ‘cheat’ (more like ‘not care’) when not around Elliana. Since the diagnosis, walking that last quarter mile to being zero gluten— UGH. It has taken so much brain space. And it’s hard. It was, perhaps, so much the easier for Elly four years ago because she really didn’t know what a good something-or-other tasted like. She’s always had the GF version. Me, though. My Scotch-German genes are rebelling LOUDLY. I haven’t been doing any grains (not even GF options) at all, or sugar. I’m okay as long as I can’t smell the real deal. My brain just can’t handle smelling yeasty, bready goodness without being all engines GO. NOW. Every time I’ve been near a bakery or something like that my body goes in over-drive, and all of the sudden my stomach is growling like I’ve never eaten in my life….each time….major head ache. It’s so weird. Even if I’ve literally just eaten. So now I can’t even enjoy the smell of it! Hopefully that will eventually fade. I am having a hard time dealing with the hangry that happens if I get too far out of a meal. I haven’t quite gotten my protein balance right. BUT. I will happily leave behind twenty pounds last month. It balances itself out then!

How about you?