It’s been a rough month and likely to get worse. Sometimes being human is just a bumpy ride and at other times, it’s talking yourself through the next minute without collapsing on the floor in a heap. I need to be in a heap for a bit.
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So
mething’s been brewing all month. I’ve been experiencing chronic insomnia and was struggling with National Novel Writing Month. I was burnt out on politics and the work associated with getting out the vote. And now, as we keep vigil over a family member in hospice, I’ve realized that I am just flat out exhausted. The daylight savings shift and sudden appearance of winter were the final kickers.
So I do what a lot of writers do, I write about my anxieties, in the hopes that they have just a little bit less of a hold over me. Putting order to chaos and words to the silence.
Aging Gracelessly
Being a member of the sandwich generation for the last 15 years, means that one is constantly needed. Parents to care for on one side and a child to raise on the other. But there comes a point when you realize in only a few years, you’ll be needed by no one and you discover how much of your identity was invested in caregiving.
I’m watching as my child becomes a young adult and goes out into the world and as parents shrink and leave the world. It also gives one a bird’s eye view of a human timeline. And how very short it all is.
On a more superficial note, I realize that I have to let go of the idea that I’m a brunette. I inherited the family gift of premature graying in my early 20s. Between dye jobs, I can see that my hair is almost completely white now. Over the next year, I’m going to go with lighter and lighter hair colors until my hair is its natural color – white. It means seeing someone else in the mirror, changing all my profile pictures, and being referred to as my daughter’s grandmother at awkward moments.
The positive side is that I’ll get the power of invisibility. I’ve experienced it off and on throughout my life, but the white hair will clinch it. I remember watching the members of my League of Women Voters chapter boldly approach strangers for voting registration and thinking how benignly people view older women. No one wants to tell grandma “no”. I have a feeling that it’s an advantage.
On the other hand, it might sack my writing career before I can even get this lead balloon off the ground. But that’s immaterial at this point.
Writing
It’s been six years since I first did National Novel Writing Month and it was apparently long enough me for to forget why I never wanted to do it again. I signed up this year, found some writing buddies to join up as well, and began the long slog towards 50,000 words. Day 7 – deleted 8,000+ words in a temper tantrum. Day 14 – Hit 15,000+ words and quit.
I love the idea and organization related to NaNoWriMo – it encourages people to do something they thought they couldn’t, as well as encouraging young writers. What I have to come to terms with is that I am an excruciatingly slow writer for a reason. I do everything slowly, because I have to rework sentences and paragraphs. I edit as I go and get overwhelmed with the mass of drivel that I tend to put out under duress.
There are great merits to pushing yourself to get past the inner editor and for the longest time, I have viewed my inner editor as a problem – something to cure myself of, so that I could be prolific. Getting older means that the time for curing oneself, for retraining a lifetime of habits starts to seem less efficient than just going with who you are and making the most of it.
During a discussion about goals at my writing group, I blurted that I wanted to write literary fiction. Someone asked me for clarification. I said I wanted to write layered, complex fiction – the kind that no one reads, but that gets awards. It felt like naked ambition to say that out loud and likely contrary to the kind of writing I’m doing now. I felt silly afterwards, as if I’d revealed some sort of shameful, secret fantasy.
Reading
There’s a trite saying about dressing for the job you want to have. I think the same thing goes for reading. I’m always reading above my grade level, because I think that’s one of the few ways that I’ll ever get better as a writer. Sometimes it feels like I’m putting on airs, being some sort of elitist, but this language and attitude is a holdover from my childhood. I was the kid who always had her nose in a book, something that was often mocked and derided. Our current culture carries a whiff of anti-intellectualism and sometimes I internalize it, because it feels familiar.
Still, I am submersing myself in the more challenging reads and coming up for air with a lighter read or two. Currently, I’m reading William Giraldi’s American Audacity: In Defense of Literary Daring and Rita Dragonette’s The Fourteenth of September, an enjoyable work of fiction about another time of social and political upheaval – the 1960’s. It reminds me of being younger and ideologically self-righteous. It’s a debut novel by an older writer. Obviously, I’m finding inspiration where I need to.
The Green Study 
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