Creative writing

After to many - months, years? - as an outsider in creative writing, today I have got back to 'school'. Right, creative writing stuf, my old kind of stuff, in Spanish, that is.
I have got fresh fuel and incentive to come back here and write. Mingle with words and savouring creative ideas, images, phrases.
Like in the old song...should I stay or should I go?
I'll give it a fair chance. Maybe this time I'll not give it up as I used to because of so many wrong reasons - aka no time, no talent.

Loved what I have heard today - "Writing comes naturally to humans".
Inch'Allah!

About hating resistance

I am back from few days in Bucharest with my parents.
 We had very hot days, temperature-wise, which limited my movements in town.
But what also limited, to a greater extent, my movements is that I am still uncomfy with going out, having an agenda of my own while I am there. There is a well-known icky sensation in my spine and bones when I have to tell my parents that I am going to town to meet friends. As if I'd be doing something wrong. (btw, when I have started writing this post I had a totally different subject in mind)


It is as if I were guilty of something I am not aware of, doing something wrong in a way I am not conscious about, but my father is totally aware and makes it clear to me. Now that I am writing it like this, it seems like a nightmare, the I-want-to-scream-but-I-can't type of nightmare.

I am guilty about it, undoubtedly, nobody explains to me what's wrong about going out to town, meeting friends, "shopping without shopping" actually, seeing what's new in a town I love.

For a long time there was this "malaise" about going out: I was always late, whenever I came back home, I seemed to be late. Not that I've been missing anything or that I've promised to be back "earlier". simply that I have stayed too long ("what could have been so much to see, there is nothing out there"). Malaise about explaining what I have been doing and whom I had met, malaise of having to explain and justify myself for doing something else than I was expected to do, even if there has never been clear what I was expected to do.

It is weird how much I have calmed down since I have started writing these lines.
I have just came to realise that when I arrived in Bucharest it was already late because I was already gone. That time is short and we could not have enough time together. Which somehow prevented us to enjoy the time we had as this time was filled with anger and uncomfortable thoughts of not living up to the expectations: be the smartest girl, have the nicest life. Being whatever I was not. This is, I see now clearly, source of much pain and suffering.

I loved my mother almost bald scalp. I found it a tender thing to look at, and I was not scared at all. The day she's told me she bought a wig I felt that something changed, that we grew closer and fonder one of the other. That some barrier fell and that was a good thing. I would never say that the mere fact of my mother having cancer is a good thing. But we managed to talk about it and see how we shared more about ourselves in this last month since she's found out.

I was about to talk about resistance, but I think I meant to write about finding (some) peace.

Closing circles

I can feel change. It is not just seasons changing, there is a sense of responsible change growing from inside.

I have decided to get myself a house. Own it, pay for it, live in it. Be responsible for it. I am in the process of finding out what I really want and I am having daily epiphanies on what I want and what I do not want.

This is a time to close circles. Not circles left open somewhere in the past. I'll close the circles next to me that feel outdated, which do not serve me anymore. I do not even have to close them myself, all I have to do is just lean into the feeling and accept their natural closing, painful at times.

Yesterday was that kind of the day when everything seems to be closing and all that is left to do is feel the pain and move on. 

My bowling club closes. My dog is old and his health is deteriorating. My parents are old and their health is not what it used to be. An old me wants to get out of the stage. My new "me" is not yet ready.

From somewhere I get a sort of wisdom to look at things with love and grace and let them be. And then let them go. Letting go is also an inside job.

Some souldiving

I am laughing out loud to myself as I am still wandering on the blogs I love as an excuse not to write these first lines on mine. I know the thing. I totally understand it, I am not blaming myself for doing so (I have been doing that wandering/blaming thing for some years now, at least ten, to put it frankly, and it only takes to more wandering and blaming). I've learnt at least two things: that what I've been doing has a generic name, procrastination and that it is not incurable.

There is another striking observation I made while « anthropologising » myself for one hour or so, lightheartedly.

Procrastinating does not make things (writing, jogging, loosing weight, journaling, living) more difficult (ok, in a sense it makes them impossible). These things are difficult in their own right in the sense that they'd bring about change. Change is difficult. Change is scary. And change-that-matters requires some amount of souldiving, quite a lot. Going down there and see, touch, explore what you feel, acknowledge your thoughts (and how your thoughts try to silent your feelings). Connect to your emotions, then come back & report. When suffering is acute, this seems unbearable.

Because we've picked up from somewhere the idea that when we are living in hell, change should be easy (fast and obvious, as a bonus), within your reach and the only option. I've been weighting the word here and I think « hell » is the right one. When you do not love yourself and you think yourself not worth of being loved, you are living in hell. Somehow there is always a way in which what makes you suffer may be resumed to not loving yourself, or not enough to treat yourself kindly.

So there is that thing that equals change to you, whatever it is. The baby step that you think you could take that you are postponing indefinitely. Against the natural move towards it, there is the natural move towards maintaining your head above the water, towards clinging to your life buoy. Which makes you delay the things you know you really want to do, the solution you'd figured out and the way to put it in place. I know it may sound counterintuitive, but in the long run life buoys (or food, or alcohol, or drugs, or denial) just don't work. Life buoys are not forever.

What I have understood is that change cannot happen while you are struggling to breath above the water. You just can't cling to your life buoy and expect to change.

Change requires some souldiving and the best you can you is to let go of whatever life buoys you've got for yourself. Go meet your soul there where it is. Celebrate it. Welcome it.

Only then surfacing together becomes an option.