Doing what nobody in the world ever gets to do

I quit work in order to write. Well, mostly. Like all things, the motivations are more complex and multi-sided including health difficulties, but the reality of my day to day is that I have no job and all the time in the world to write. Hmm, what I wanted to express in this post came out so much better in my head while I was showering. Basically, I'm terrified, and guilty-feeling for not being A+ productive suburbanite. Because nobody gets to quit thier job and do what they WANT all day! Unless you are going to college, of course, so that is how I justify this to myself - I'm basically having a self-created internship, or creative writing workshop - and the only money I pay for it is the money I lose by not working. It's a lovely cycle of self-justification and nagging guilt and feeling like a total ass to think that anything will ever come of my writing. And then I just have to try to get the fuck outside myself and worrying about all this and just write, or rather, edit, the Persephone novel. Which I've done in these total of two days into this crazy freedom land of no-work.

I'm just not good at transitions. I don't have a routine, and all I am doing is thinking, which gives me horrible insomnia when I'm not in the mindless go-go-go routine of work. And then I'm sleepy when I go to write, and then there is no point in any of it and I should have just stayed at my crap job that was horrible and suffered unhappily like a good little suburbanite.

Exciting!!!!

I'm really excited about this publication. To read my short piece, "Conversation With My Four-Year-Old", click here:

Paradigm Journal

I'm under the non-fiction section!

Acceptance in Paradigm Journal

Another acceptance into a literary journal - Paradigm! It's for a short non-fiction piece about the bittersweet tension of being a mother with a chronic illness.

I wrote this piece a couple of months ago, but have been especially reminded of how much I hate being sick lately. I've been sick for 8 years now, and the anger at it comes in waves - there's months when my norm seems like normal to me - as if, of course I walk around tired and weak and unable to do things other mothers can do - of course that's normal. And then there are days and weeks and months where I wish illness was a tangible thing that I could beat to a pulp and scream at for what it has stolen from me.

But then of course, it's not a tangible thing, only as tangible as my body, and hating my body as if it were a separate entity from me, the real, true me inside - dude, that's kind of fucked up. Lately I've been trying to come to terms that I can't separate my identity from my body - that I am both mind AND body, even though I'd rather only identify myself in terms of the former. I've been stretching and lotioning and got a new large beautiful tattoo - like I'm reclaiming territory, or at least control, of this physical body that so often feels like the enemy. But then the damn body kicks back, like this week when I tried to do too much light excersize, and the rage starts up all over again.