Out of Dormancy

A fire-color, blazing on the ground and throughout limbs, would suggest warmth but the air is chilled instead. A plastic skull, a Halloween decoration, in the front garden is caverned under drooping mums. My backyard is covered with leaf carnage, blanketing what little grass we have and bringing it to brown in this season of death-like sleep.

Contrary to nature, I have been feeling renewed lately, coming out of a dull, anxious state. Last night I was reading the Lofty Ambitions blog's post, "Neil Gaiman on Being a Writer." If you don't know, I am a HUGE Neil Gaiman fan, so that was initially what piqued my interest to read it. But, I discovered that Lofty Ambitions is a great writing blog, and reading that post I felt overcome by the last paragraph in which the blog writer paraphrases Gaiman on becoming a writer: 

"...if he didn’t try to become a writer, he’d think on his deathbed, I could have been a writer. And he wouldn’t know whether that was true or whether he was fooling himself. So he decided to give it a serious go, to find out whether he could become a writer, to remove doubt. He doesn’t seem to have any other question about what he might have been and is comforted to know that, on his deathbed, he will say, I was a writer."

I was gripped by the image of being on my deathbed and not having at least seriously tried to be a writer. How many times will I do this? I hide from writing, my first love, and am discovered by that often latent passion stumbling upon another writer's blog, or listening to Writer's Almanac on the radio, or simply reading some ill-written words on the page of a magazine. A feeling of being discovered not doing what I'm supposed to runs through my body, left behind and lazy.

So, here I am once again, creaking open the door , which is in need of a little WD40, to connecting unlikely thoughts and details, to making up fun lies of history and the present and future, to leaving my body behind and residing in characters - to writing. I'll have to get back the flow and rhythm of it, and to reteach my mind to think of everyday things as a writer thinks of them. It won't be hard and it won't take long, but I'm out of practice.

Some hopeful news: I will be able to graduate with my Masters in Library and Information Science (MLIS) in August of 2012. I have less than a year in this program, and I'm very happy to have it over with. With luck and connections, I hope to find a job as a librarian next fall. Interestingly, I'm already thinking about going back into an MFA in Creative Writing program again. Not sure if Converse College's program is the one for me, though I started the program there. I still want to teach writing one day.

A friend suggested I do National Novel Writing Month, more fondly known as NaNoWriMo. The problem with that is I have no idea for a short story at this moment, let alone a novel. But, it's been my experience sometimes that beginning to write will alone engender idea and story. Well, I have until tomorrow to decide if I am going to be writing a novel in November or not. If I do, it will be complete shit. But then I'll have the shit out of the way really fast.

So perhaps, by the time all the red and orange from the trees has turned to crunchy ground cover, I'll have gotten it out of the way. After all, I'm not a stranger to this process, just a truant.

Taking steps towards being okay

Only in silence the word,
only in dark the light,
only in dying life:
bright the hawk's flight
on the empty sky.
            - The Creation of Ea, 
              A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin

I pick it off the top of a stack I bought at a giant book sale back at summer's end. The first words I read, before chapter one of A Wizard of Earthsea, are like the red letters.

Talk-therapy with my sister yesterday over pizza brought me out of my head for the day. But by tonight I needed more and Daniel listened to over an hour of descriptions of my screwed-up mind lately. Clearer now, with a promise to Angela to start blogging again this very day, and every day, I am here doing what I have thought about doing and should have been doing for months now.

I began this blog out of conviction that happiness is self-created. In the time since I last posted in February, pathetically about an anniversary post that never happened, I have felt unworthy to post on a blog about overcoming depression. This is because I have been in it. I've been experiencing pretty extreme episodes of anxiety for a few weeks now, and it feels like carrying a giant crushing stone wheel that keeps rolling over me as I try to throw it off. But I have begun the process of trying to outsmart it.

Feeling surrounded and trapped lately by random possibilities like disease and sudden death, the opening verse of Earthsea shushed my mind for the "word," and recalled the contingencies, the appositives that allow life to be the precious thing it is. If it weren't for the bad, the good would not be.

So, in answer to what threatens my happiness and my stability in the dark moments: thank you. Because the evil little gremliny creatures stalk my sanity, I learn I can conquer them.

And mostly, thanks to God for, indeed being God, speaking through who and what God will.

This is the start of something better for me - this moment.