Life Advice From a Friend
Posted under: I’ve been having a bleh time of it lately.
Not a HARD time, and not a BAD time, just … bleh. You know?
I was talking things out with a good friend of mine via email, and we had the following conversation. I intended to blog ABOUT the conversation, but upon further reflection, I think she said it best in her own words.
Furthermore, I figured her advice could help some of YOU as much as it did me.
It sounds funny, but life’s small crises are often harder to deal with. The big ones are dramatic. You get sympathy, a story to tell. Your friends and family rally around you. Major crises bring out the best in us. On some bad days I swear I can almost hear “The Eye of the Tiger” playing in the background. :-p
The little crises, though, are insidious. They build, slowly stealing all the joy and magic out of your life. Nothing dramatic ever grabs your attention, demands action. You just wake up one morning, realize the whole world’s gone grey, and wonder how that happened. I would not wish away any of the true crises I’ve been through. They made me who I am, gave my life the spine it has now.
The little ones? I’d dump the lot of them. Useless, buggering soul-killers, every single one.
[...]
If you can’t find an hour to write, what about 15 minutes? It sounds strange, but that’s what I did. At first I found it extremely difficult to make myself write. Finding a ‘spare hour’ seemed impossible. So I scheduled 15 minutes. The first few times, this was horrid, but I forced myself to barf on the page for a quarter of an hour. Didn’t matter if I was feeling creative or not, I just wrote. Then, I started getting into it. I’d hit the end of my 15 minutes and linger an extra half hour, “just to finish this scene”. Pretty soon, an hour was no problem. Over Thanksgiving I could easily spend 3-6 hours in a row writing.
That last bit is still for anybody, just replace “writing” with “thing you love to do but aren’t DOING, despite knowing better”. Like drawing or woodworking or learning the guitar.
So yeah. An hour? Sometimes that feels like forever. Especially lately, when I’ve been drained and gray by the time I sit down at my computer.
Fifteen minutes, though? I can do that.
Anyone else have fifteen minutes to spare? Anyone else know that feeling of creeping hoarfrost sneaking up on your life, leeching out all the color?
(Also, my friend totally used this method to write her book in 3 months. First draft finished today! *confetti, balloons, pompoms*)
I’m not currently in this spot, but I’ve been there. Oh boy, have I been there. When I’m not creating something (sewing, knitting, drawing, whatever) I start to feel stagnant and stiffled. But, just as you’ve discussed, when I’m feeling crappy I don’t want to do anything and the problem snowballs.
Here’s to finding 15 minutes! Hopefully it’ll ease your way out of the funk.
YES to the snowballs. Egads. I haven’t liked anything I’ve drawn in months.
*hugs* 15 minutes. I can DO this.
Hmmmm..lots of stuff there. But I think the bigger problem, for you, is that the job you want to have is really your recreation/hobby. So instead of feeling a joy about writing, you feel a guilt about not having done your “job” today, which is really not your job, but you want it to be so you take it seriously like it is a job, but your priorities make it a hobby. Man, that in itself is annoying, Tami!!
So, not at all the same, but just exactly so, is the “job” of being a mother. So that you come home from a long day of what your “real” responsibility is, and you are tired and want to wind down, but you have this other, very important “hobby” that demands lots of time and focus and energy if you want to do it well. And so you really don’t want to make dinner, because you are tired and all, so you order out a pizza and feel tons of guilt for feeding your children lousy food, but if you had made dinner, you probably would have just opted for mac n cheese, which is no better and you confront the fact that you are just a lousy, horrible mother.
Here would be where I offer my sagacious thoughts on how to manage all that. You have to work hard…HARD…at removing the negative thought about writing being “work.” You are putting that label on that task and making it something that you really do not want it to be. (I mean, you do. You want writing to be our profession, but you DON’T want it to be your job. Can you make this any more complicated?)
So when you sit down to write for 15 minutes, DON’T make is a task. Remove that label. Just write for fun, without the purpose of “I need to finish the next chapter.” And since it is just for fun…why not try a different venue than the computer? Try writing in bed with paper and pencil..or pen…sometimes it has to be in pen. Or out on the porch.
That works with dinner as well. If you fix a picnic for the back yard, that is all sorts of exciting for everyone.
And those gray periods….where nothing has really ruined your life, but you cannot, CANNOT, face another day of all the same old stuff…those are hard to get through. I don’t know why our minds do that to us….it seems so counterproductive, no? I have no advise on that. Man, I don’t wish those days on anyone, especially when they started bleeding into one another and the feeling lasts for weeks.
Anne, please stop saying that you are a lousy mother. It screws up my whole perception of you as the perfect role model. :p
Also, how I remember pizza night: Pizza is a treat! What did I do to deserve such a special dinner? Hooray!
There’s a thin line between “job” and “something that needs to get done”.
I’m not disagreeing (at all!) that the “Ugh, another job” mentality needs to go away, but there will definitely be effort to reach a point where it gets done even when I don’t want to do it.
Writing is easy when things are sunshine and brightness, but it needs to happen even when things are colorless and bleh.
You might want to find out about how I handled the whole tooth fairy thing before you pick me as your role model, KristenSue!
You will find, I think, that you have a different view of things as a parent than you did as a child. For instance, Bob and I were discussing…umm…I can’t remember what…but we decided that it was rather like staying at a hotel. When you were a kid that was the best, most exciting thing ever. As an adult, I have a much different response…rather like, “Ewww! Don’t touch that!!”
I just came home from making a “fake homemade’ Christmas purchase. I bought some stoneware that a friend of ours makes, which IS a homemade item, just not by me. Anyway, I was thinking about the post and came to this conclusion:
It is a lot of stupid hard work to stay happy. And how wrong is it that you have to WORK to be happy? Isn’t happiness suppose to be that feeling of relaxation and contentment? I dunno, but I just may not like happiness. I feel it misrepresents itself.
Happiness is effort way too often. An unfair amount of often.
On the other hand, without the gray to compare it to, how would you know you were happy?
…because I’d be happy. ;)
Re: writing: this is solid advice. I used to trick myself into writing by telling myself to write “One sentence a day”– knowing full well that I’d end up writing several paragraphs. Recently I’ve been trying to stick to the manageable goal of 400 words a day– your Taven Deadliner is actually helpful for keeping track of that!
Pike´s last post ..Forget micro, I want picomanagement!
OoOoOh, so glad the deadliner is helping you! That’s awesome.
The “one sentence a day” trick sounds great. I’ll have to try that!
Tami, very insightful post. You are right on the money when you say that life’s small crises are much more difficult than truly large challenges. I believe that there’s nothing I can do or say to make you feel better, but there is one important thing to remember – you WILL feel better. This will pass, the small crises will finally be eliminated (for a time – sorry!) and you will find your joie de vivre again.
I go through bleh times quite often, and yet I can’t say anything better than your other friends here. Don’t beat yourself up for feeling bleh – it’s OK, let it happen. We all love your upbeat personality, but don’t put pressure on yourself to always be that way. Wish I had a miracle cure, but sometimes you just got to let it run its course.
I’d like to reiterate what Pike said – write one sentence a day. I think it will help break the bleh.
Merry Christmas to everyone! May your new year be completely devoid of bleh!
*nod* I think it’s just a time when I need to slow down and focus on small things instead of big ones. Make sure I do my yoga, take relaxing baths, try not to worry so much about responsibilities that aren’t really responsibilities. (Gaming and writing FEEL like extra jobs sometimes, but they’re not. Only my job is a job. Everything else is a choice, and it’s good to remember that)
Just as appetite comes by eating, so work bings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.
Igor Stravinsky
(If you like quotes and Russians, this oughta suit ya.)
Along the lines of your “we need unhappiness to help us be know happiness”…I would like to apply that line of thinking to other things.
If I have never been thin, how can I know if I am fat?
If I have never been seroius, how can I know if I am funny?
And lastly, if I have never been successful, how do I know I am a failure?
This explains a lot about my life now.
I was going to write a response, but then I thought I’d write a post instead. </Mitch Hedburg voice>
http://exwebris.net/blog/to-be-happy-is-to-have-been-sad/
brad-o´s last post ..To Be Happy is to Have Been Sad?