December 15, 2021
My eyes and head are heavy after four hours of revising, especially since I feel dissatisfied with the work. Yesterday I did more in just three hours and felt accomplished and hopeful after. Today I came upon some rough chapters that need more re-structuring and the work slackened. I feel despondent.
But that is not the worst of it. The worst is that the book sounds worst and worst every time I read it. I have no objectivity about it. I am sitting here on the black futon in my writing room and trying to think of the nice things people who read the book said about it. But all that comes up in my mind is—what makes you think you know how to write a novel, revise a novel, or even know if a novel, any novel, is any good?
Hmm...
Last week I had crept away one afternoon and sat two hours in the library café. It was raining outside, and the light was grey and soft. There was a bunch of men chatting loudly at one end of the café but the tables in the cafe are spread over a large area and I found one at the other end of the high-ceilinged room. It was quiet and slow, and my mind began self-loosening some of the shackles that I keep it in, so it doesn’t wander helter-skelter all day. One of the things I began thinking of was how the pandemic had diluted the intensity or even taken away my passions, but amplified my obsessions. Passions release happy energy; obsessions just make me miserable. I cannot remember ever feeling before 2020 the listlessness I had felt for most of the year. Later in the week a friend I had brunch with asked me how I survived the depression I had sunk into in 2020. Luckily one passion survived through and kept me afloat. I mean karate ofcourse.
I have been trying to explore the energies of this year. In many ways it was worse than 2021 as since the beginning of the year, until at least September, my health issues and stress levels were astronomical. The year began with plodding, sinking, awareness-blinding energies. But that 27-day blog challenge I set myself in the middle of the year changed my relationship to them. I see today that when I lose my words, I also lose my ability to hope. I don’t know how I can remember this in the future during times I feel lonely and despairing.
I had wanted down time during the last two weeks of the year. Chatting with or emailing friends, sitting in the library café and journaling about the year, training but slowing down a bit there too, and most of all organizing my bits and books. It all feels a huge clutter right now, a clutter that keeps me awake at nights as I haven’t yet resolved the tension between my inner minimalist and my materialist. The minimalist energy is rising strongly — perhaps an effect of the pandemic where so many of us realized how little we need to live well.
I remember that in August too I had wished for a month with a lot of time to slow down. It hadn’t been so. It was filled with doctor visits, tests and exhaustion The end of the year is similarly chaotic and the exhaustion is colossal, but something has shifted. I can’t fully identity the subtle change in energy. Not light and hopeful yet. Still a lot of swirling fear and uncertainty. But pockets, occasional small pockets, where the mind finds rest.
It began raining as I wrote. The wind blows, the doors bang. Time to switch to my other passion, the one that carried me through the pandemic.
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