No matter how hard you push yourself, how much you try to cram into your 7 day week, if you're burning the candle at both ends, your body will just stop and welcome in a virus with open arms. It won't even let you dwell on what you should be doing. It prescribes sleep, dead, delirious, drowsy sleep.
As you've probably guessed - I've been sick. No, not just sick in the head ;) I've been properly sick with a cold. This one was another doozy. It took 3 weeks to take hold, then a week of bed and snottiness and then finally, I gave up trying to fight this thing on my own and filled my antibiotic prescription.
So now I'm finally on the mend. Anyway, enough wallowing in self-pity, I'm here to blog goddamit! I've got lots to tell you!
For starters, May didn't go quite as I planned it. I was soooo excited about life in April, the weather was still good and I signed myself up for every possible distraction (from writing my novel) that I could in the month of May.
Then May happened and I couldn't keep up the momentum. I failed my yoga challenge (I went 18 times in 28 days instead of the prescribed 24) and only meditated a few times (I comforted myself by the fact that I would meditate for 5 mins at the end of every yoga class). Instead of having a totally zen month, I got sick and then my stress levels rose to an all time high till about a week ago.
Hence, why I've kept quiet on the blogging front.
After all my amazing bragging about my life and the changes I'd made, I hardly wanted to jump online to admit to you all that I am a charlatan. But I guess I'm doing that right now anyway!
But the yoga challenge ended up teaching me something worthwhile.
Listen to your body and leave your ego at the door.
I realised that I couldn't do 24 sessions of yoga, not because of some personality flaw or lack of willpower but because my body, the dear old vessel that carries me around every day, was tired. It just needed a rest. It needed to get sick to clear out the debris - the ultimate detox.
The best thing to come out of 'My May Meltdown' was that it reminded me to focus on my writing. Although I haven't been blogging, I've been writing a lot more of my novel and I am so close to the end of my first draft, its scary! I never thought I'd get here. I bloody hoped I would but I'm not always 'follow through' girl. Most of the time I get bored and give up on things. Not important things like people, work and study, I mean little creative projects that I have started over the years. And this is probably because I haven't allowed myself to consider creative things as 'important' or acceptable ways to spend my time.
For example, I have a little black travel cosmetics case (probably about the size of an old-fashioned hat box) that I got given years ago. Inside I used to put all my writing from dinky diaries I kept as a child to teenage journals and angsty poetry. For about 20 years, this is where I put anything I wrote. Occasionally, I would bring it out and read through my scribblings, laughing at how much things had changed and how much they had stayed the same.
Sometimes I would even read parts out to my best friend or boyfriend at the time. But apart from that, it was sealed tight and kept buried at the bottom of my wardrobe.
It was only a few years ago, when I started writing my novel (and I couldn't keep my computer in this box!) that I realised what I had been doing. I was a bloody closet creative. I had locked away that part of my personality, as if it was 'wrong', as if it should be hidden from public view. It was my deep dark dirty secret.
And now, I know this is bullshit. I know I can allow myself to create. I know it makes me a happier, better person. I know it helps me make sense of this crazy world we live in. I know this is my path in life. Finally I have found my passion, my dream. (Maybe not found, more like rediscovered or admitted to myself!)
It feels so good, I want to join the bloody literary mari gras! I wanna get on top of a float, covered with books and magazines and periodicals and gyrate to songs about literature (if there are any and they can be mixed into dance tracks, that is!) I wanna wear my author status with pride. I wanna make a big badge saying "I write and I'm proud of it!"
I wanna go back upstairs now from my lunch break and tell them that I quit. Effective immediately. They can stick their office job where the sun don't shine cos I am worth more than all the dollars and pounds and yen in the world. I am a writer!!!
Hmmm...maybe I've had too much caffeine today? ;)
