Cancer log 163: At the…

Cancer log 163: At the airport, waiting for my flight home from the conference. Am trying not to be mad at myself for not getting any writing done today. The plan was to write today; that's why I scheduled my flight out so late. But this stupid head cold has fuzzed up my brain and all I want to do is sleep. I slept eleven hours last night and I'm still tired. I am so sick of being sick. Last year I lost so much time -- conference people kept asking me all weekend how I was, and I kept saying, oh, fine, but I have a cold. Which is not a big deal normally, but right now, it feels like I have been sick for years.

And the conference was great, very intellectually stimulating, but that's not actually such a great thing, because my brain keeps working, and the stories keep piling up, and the essays too, and if I don't download some of them soon, I think I might explode. But the kids need me and my students need me and thankfully Kevin and Jed are pretty self-sufficient, but still, and the dishes and laundry still need to be done and even though Kevin takes half of that, it's still plenty of work and it all takes time. And even if I do somehow carve out enough hours of the day to write, and even if I'm not sick, then the anxiety descends that whatever I write will be terrible.

Because great writers, they probably dedicate far more of their lives to writing, instead of somehow trying to squeeze it into the interstices between illness and children and domesticity and work. They have space and time to write a bunch of bad words and then throw those out and write more bad words and throw those out and finally write the good words. It is an impossible pressure when you feel like everything you write has to be perfect the first time out because you won't have time to redo it.

In other news, this next week is spring break. I am clearly needing the break rather desperately, but I'm already panicking because I need to rest and I need to write and I can't do both at the same time. And I have an appointment with the plastic surgeon tomorrow, to talk in more detail about what I might or might not do, and I would totally do various things if I could just wave a magic wand and have them done, but this is surgery, and even minor surgery takes time so do I want it badly enough to lose yet more writing time? Argh.