Monday, July 27, 2009

Getting Through It

Friends of mine are in a bad way this week.
One friend was stranded with her adult daughter in Colorado Springs, but through some fancy footwork with a credit card, a few things to sell on Ebay, and friends loaning money, we managed to get a bus ticket for them to come home tomorrow.

Another friend is facing another battle with a recurring illness. After having had surgery in January, further, more intensive surgery is needed, and coming up on August 5th.

Yet another new but dear friend is battling a brain tumor. This will be her seventh session with chemo, and it will be interspersed with radiation therapy, I figure right now they are trying to give her as much time as they can. Her son is a gem. He is keeping us posted on how she is doing. I hope knowing we are listening is helping him, too.
She is a veteran, and had a bad series of war zones, and damn but she deserves better than this. Hell, don't we all deserve better than that?

Sometimes wise things come out of my fingers. At the time, my friend who was emailing me needed to hear it; today, I need to hear it again.
She honored me by posting it in her blog, smoothing it into something fine, and I quote her reworking of it here:
"...And Diana, on the receiving end of that email, with the wisdom of having been both participant and observer in such things, reminded me that it is harder to witness suffering than to live it. When it is ours, we deal with it and adjust, enjoying what we can do and getting through what we can’t."

Here's hoping we all get through it this time, too.

Thursday, April 2, 2009

what it is

I started this blog to write the stuff running through my head. Likely not of interest to everyone, more of a public journal to the process my brain conversations. I write it to remind myself what my core ideas are, what I want from life, what I'm working on and why its hard to reach for what i truly am passionate about.
Today, a conversation I had with O. is going through my head. He said something to the effect that getting a knitting pattern up for sale was my dream. Without thought, my answer snapped back "That's not my dream, my dream is to write." Specifically, to write and get published something that makes a difference.

Maybe that's the problem. Pursuing the pleasant, the ok, the fun but superficial is easy as falling off a frog.
The stuff I'm pssionate about, the writing, is sort of freaking me out somewhere, I guess.
I have lots of physical and mental impediments to writing to creating worlds and people, and situations. even to writing non-fiction that may help someone.
Are they real impediments?
Yep. (not being able to write well while reclining, not being able to sit up long enough, not being able to sit with my feet down long enough, brain fog from fibro, from pain, from pain meds, forgetting what I'm writign int eh middle of a sentence is extremley frustrating, and can trigger depression, my dyslexia... I could keep listing impediments, but that probably won't lead to a solution.

Are those impediments the reason it's not happening?
I'm not so sure.
Other possibilities are:
Fear of Success
Self Sabatoge
Feeling unworthy of my dream
Fear of increasing my level of daily frustration.
Fear of totally giving up. *ding ding ding*

I think we have a weiner.
It's bits of all of it, but the final one is what really twanged my strings.
I fear failing often enough that I give up.
Trying in the past has always ended up with not being able to put the ideas together, to having pain or pain meds inturrupt my thoughts, to ultimately setting the grand plan aside.
I have tried many ways of structuring the actual physical writing, none have worked well.

So I'm taking a mental vacation. When circumstances change, I will dust off those story and book idea files and start again.

I have another passion for creating collage art.
That one hass a pretty big physical impediment right now, with the house not set up for my power chair.
I don't feel the same block with the collage stuff as I do the writing stuff. It seems less frustrating not to be able to do it.
Less emotional investment, I guess that's key.

This entry will end the way the books I hate do, without a solid conclusion.