Pulling weeds

I’ve been super-crabby the last few days, trying to rein it in with Kevin and the kids, although bits have slipped out, and it’s very clearly because we’re weeks into summer and I haven’t done any substantial writing yet.

I’m trying to be patient with myself, but it’s hard. There are reasons — I had a huge pile of backlogged urgent things to deal with, for one. Financial stuff that had to be addressed (and a few big ones are STILL in progress, but we’re getting there, and I can’t wait for them to be dealt with). A garden in dire need of weeding and mulching — I’m a solid month behind on that, which was making me crazed as the weeds grew to knee-high, waist-high, shoulder-high…

The house was chaotic — clean enough on the surface, between the hired cleaner who came every two weeks to do the floors and bathrooms and kitchen, and Chris who does dishes and laundry twice a week. But every area that could accumulate STUFF had done so, and so the last few weeks have been a slow sorting process, clearing section by section. The first floor is almost done now. The second floor will take longer, and the basement, gah. I’m hoping to make the kids help with sorting the toys they’ve outgrown, but Anand gets attached to everything, so it’s slow there too.

And there were a host of other tasks — academic stuff to wrap up, lots of cookbook things, Maram event things, I’m not even sure what else, but somehow, the e-mail & FB messaging stack has not shrunk yet, despite my attacking it assiduously every day.

Add in to all that — I was just TIRED. I came off the end of the semester more exhausted than normal; there was too much packed in this last winter & spring, and I need to schedule myself a little less, take the community service work slower. I still want to do more with both Maram and the SLF, but I am trying to be patient with a longer process. It’s hard, esp. when I have volunteers ready to help, but organizing them takes a good amount of my time, just to get them up and running. I am trying to tell myself that we’ll get there.

So I gave myself a week to just rest and recover without even worrying about writing, and that was fine. And then the kids’ school ended, and I gave myself a week to try to get them settled into a no-camp summer schedule for the first time, and that was mostly fine, though I thought I’d do some writing at points when I ended up not, which started to grate on me a bit.

And now we’re well into the second week of that, and they’re back to more electronics than I’d like and less exercise, and I’m still not writing. More reading, though — at least taking them to the park / library / pool is pretty conducive to reading. I’ve finished a few early Le Guin novels, 1.5 garden magazines (I’m finally through March and part of May — with luck I’ll make it to July by actual July), a few short stories. I’ve also started actually getting into podcasts, and discovered they pair really well with weeding & other garden work, also dishes and laundry and sorting, so that’s a life improvement thing.

Still, June, my one clear month with no travel, is two-thirds over, and I had such plans for all the writing I would get done, and I have so far spent approximately 30 minutes on one story revision. GAH.

And it isn’t even all work — the only video game I allow on my phone these days, Polytopia, came out with a new ‘race’ this week, and I fell compulsively into that for several hours. Finally mastered it last night, and I just have one race left before I have three stars on all of them, but the urgency seems to have eased, thankfully. Not really urgency about the game, I think — more self-soothing, in the same way as the 2.5 seasons of Death in Paradise (British murder mysteries) that I’ve binged in the last week.

The back of my head is pushing me to write, and I want to write, but I’m anxious about writing (WHAT IF IT ISN’T ANY GOOD???), and it was okay when I had many urgent things that had to be done, but as those got cleared away, I had to turn to videogames and TV to keep myself from writing, and the back of my brain is well aware that this is basically a ploy, and so I get increasingly crabby with myself.

The only cure for this is writing. I know. I KNOW. Eventually, I will hit a tipping point, where the frustrating beats out the fear, and I fall into the work again.

I’m almost there. I can taste it.

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