This month is National Novel Writing Month – it’s the month many authors chose to crank out as many words as they can in a spirited competition with others or themselves. I have always wanted to join in the festivities but September through December are always my hardest months because my body goes from quite functional to almost flat lining while my mind stays alert and wanting to be active. This is torture. It’s also the few months all the big holidays are under so stress! Stress! Stress! In addition to this I get to try to reign in sanity in my life this year… Life decided to trip me hard and I fell flat on my face, moving back into my mother’s home which is badly hoarded and completely not functional in any real capacity. For the past few months I have been dealing with this absolute mind fuck by running away – starting a travel blog, wandering to the most beautiful corners of New England and just spending the day communing with the trees. When I got home I had the joy of writing up each happy little day and sharing the photos I’d taken on my travel blog Catching Marbles. Then I would usually be passed out in a near coma for a day or two recovering, sometimes in great pain, sometimes not, heading out again whenever I woke. But as I said before winter is coming and my body is no longer able to run away at nearly the same capacity I was…. so I am stuck here, looking at all the shit around me wondering what to do next.
Previously I had let these circumstances get me down and depress me. Now I am issuing it as a challenge because I cannot function here and until I can there seems little hope I can move on with my life. There is currently no tables, work spaces, or surfaces in which I can indulge in the art which I was going to work hard on this winter and sell at craft fairs – so no extra pittance of an income for me. I also have no storage what-so-ever so everything I moved in with is still in boxes, piled in a few small corners that weren’t already filled. Even my clothes are in piles here and there with no dresser to call home. My room looks like a storage unit, my TV toddles atop a pile of stuff, I sleep on a used mattress sitting directly on the floor. It’s hard not to wonder what the fuck I ever did to deserve this but I realized that is the wrong way to think about it. Instead of viewing it as unjust punishment I have reframed the whole situation as the biggest physical and mental challenge of my life. Instead of working on my art, or escaping, I have been sleeping, getting up for four hours and hacking away at all the problems causing the mess before returning for another few hours of sleep and repeating. My goal is to have this basement hauled out and insanely functional by Christmas. If I succeed I will help my mother upstairs with a far bigger mess… eventually wandering outside in the spring for my own sanity, making an enormous garden to keep my wandering mind busy and to hone my agricultural skills for the days when I actually find a permanent escape.
This all may seem like madness, far more than a challenge, far more than someone with my body and health can handle, and you’re probably right… but until I do I can’t improve either, so it needs to get done one way or the other and who knows, maybe this is the reason I am here – to teach me patience, more skills, to work my mind, to let me learn how best to utilize my time, to rescue my mother from this monsoon of shit she seems to have amassed.
I have already started. I started by hauling out the basement hallway until it was empty – which took me two or three days with the same above near unworkable sleep routine. From there I built a shelving unit to run the length of it – this should have taken me 2-3 hours but it took all week and my body is KILLING me because of the physical aspect of building it. But it’s up!! And in use as I put finishing touches on it! I have started to put my clothes, crafting supplies, and cleaning supplies on it. This is freeing up some space as I move more shit to the attic, get my mother to reclaim all that is hers, and encourage her to throw things out. She asked what she could do to help and I assigned her the laundry room which is a small corner of the basement always flooded with random clothes on the floor, on the dryer, on the shelving unit and desk that should have never been in there, all mingling with the litter boxes and whatever else found their way into that mess. I called in the troops – and guess what? All the crap on the floor was thrown out or washed, the washing machine has nothing on top of it, and best of all she allowed me to throw out the desk and shelving unit if I promised to build something more functional. I have decided a TINY shelf for detergents, a hamper to throw laundry that’s in the dryer when someone else needs to use it, and a folding table that folds up and hangs on the wall when not in use so it can’t collect anything. I have made the laundry room efficient and hopefully impossible to fuck up. Believe it or not this small accomplishment has given me great hope and strength.
Now I continue to haul out various corners one at a time. Eventually I will have a functional living space down here. And from there I can go back to throwing myself into my art, if I desire to do so, because I’ll have a working space! I can sculpt, sew, design, paint, knit, tattoo, all the things I love doing! And maybe someone might be interested in something I make for purchase, although historically I have failed here too, repeatedly and over the course of years. I’m not giving up. (This photo is my Droog Cockatoo sculpture — you can’t see it but his feathers are finely detailed. He is a weird little masterpiece from my disturbing mind.)
And when I am too weak to stand but still OK enough to sit? I will write. This may not be a novel… it may not be much… but I will write something as often as I can – be it blogs, short stories, maybe even a novel someday when I can regain focus. This is the way I will move forward – working hard, creating, and archiving, until something changes. I feel calm lately. Self-assured. Confident. My unwavering faith that I will see the light at the end of this tunnel continues to keep driving me forward. I don’t know where I’ll end up, what my life will look like, or who will populate my surroundings, but for the first time in a long time I can relax and stop worrying about my dreaded and possibly dismal future. The universe has always given me what I needed, at exactly the point in time I needed it, and should I continue on this long road I know I will be rewarded. It’s just wise not to expect anything specific as that reward – because that’s a great way to breed disappointment!