This past week, my writing work has picked up to the point where my mind is left strained, incapable of producing intelligible words after a certain point. Though I’m beyond thrilled and appreciative to have the work, it leaves me with leftover brain mush to spew out onto my blog. My blog is a big part of my life and I made a promise to myself to write every day (a promise I haven’t kept), but on days when my mental and emotional states are taxed, I want nothing more than to write “BLARGHHHHHSMAPPPPPPP!” over and over in this empty white space.
But last night at 2AM, I forced myself to upchuck thoughts onto paper with pen, something I hadn’t done in awhile and something that ended up looking like a child wrote it. It was difficult and often ugly, but a good exercise in knowing that I could still partake in the art of journal-scribbling.
My life has gotten very regimented. I go to bed around 12AM-1AM, wake up between 8:30AM-9:30AM and write and interact on the web until the waft of unwashed body makes it way to my nostrils and reminds me that I need to take a shower. Most of my mental energies go towards writing and towards interacting with my boyfriend, who I now live with, and who works out of the house when not teaching at the university. I no longer say hello to myself or engage in conversation. I command myself to go into hyper-drive and wait until I sputter out. Writing professionally has veered me away from writing about my thoughts, but as you’ve seen the past week with various personal posts, at the end of the work day, I’ve been stripped naked and forced to listen to myself.
So, please excuse the divergence of fun stuff on the blog for this week. Right now, I’m waaaaay up in my head.
You can’t turn your brain off- you can’t- and as you wait for the sleeping pill to lay its blanket over you, all you can think about is how you can’t sleep on your right side due to a pain that made itself known in your abdomen several weeks back and that it must be cancer, because you always have to go there- you have to sprint to the very end; this leads you to missing the days you would write in a journal overlooking the knowing lights of LA and hope that one day you’d be anywhere other than there- and now you are- but you want to go back to the time you wanted to go forward and you’re hoping this sleeping pill kicks in soon because you drank coffee after 7PM and when you forget that you drank coffee after 7PM, you think you’re losing your mind and all the little sounds, all the tiny, indecipherable sounds are ominous and directed at you, so you leave the radio on to distract you from the cancer, the dreams of the past and the tiny sounds; the bird joins the cacophony by ringing his bell- your anxiety is causing him anxiety and he knows, all animals know- and it’s coming, your eyelids are falling, but your heart is racing- maybe your bouncing baby heart broke a rib and that is why you have the pain and all you can think about are the places you’ve been that you will never see again.
2 Comments
If this is the kind of thing you ‘upchuck’ at the end of an exhausting day, you should definitely keep it up. Lovely – don’t change a thing 🙂
I second that. Your upchucking reads like something an MFA student would congratulate themselves for and then say, “My work is done, I don’t have to write again for a while.”