I've been feeling a little strange lately--stagnant. I'm doing okay, I just feel like whatever well of creativity and enthusiasm that usually carries me through has dried up for the time being. I feel utterly unmotivated, though that's not entirely true... as always, I can still pull myself together when there is an external factor to please and as such, the last week or so has been quite eventful for reasons I'll share with you down the line.
But when it comes to just me, it is so much easier to sit idly waiting for a distraction--a book, a show, Kevin coming home from work. So much easier to do that than to feel individual direction and purpose. I knew that leaving the world of teaching was going to be difficult--and necessary--because I let that become my identity. But for awhile there, I felt like things were okay. I was writing, I had goals going, I was planning for the future... All things I haven't been able to bring myself to do as of late. Which is why I've posted nothing rather than something half-hearted.
It's uncomfortable to try to figure out what your place is in the world, especially when you never dreamed you'd need to do such a thing at twenty-eight. I had it figured out; I went to grad school for this. It's frightening and lonely, though I know there are millions of others who have or are going through the same.
It's also difficult because I didn't leave in order to do something specific; I left in order to live. Which doesn't leave me with a very clear idea of where I'd like to go from here. I want to write, I want to look after my family and my home, and I want to be healthy. But in the last three weeks or so, I've retreated into the mindset of "perfect or nothing," and I feel stuck.
Because perfect or nothing is a losing game, and I have like eighty nothingness trophies taking up space in my closet. (Which by the way, desperately needs reorganizing, but in my head, any efforts to do so would be futile because I'm not going to be able to create this:
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| Domino, February 2007 |
in two hours, so what, pray tell, is even the point?) Picture me saying that to Kevin, but really dramatically and through tears.
But enough of my moaning and groaning. How to get past this? Last Friday a friend and I had a good phone chat about this general feeling of uggghhhh. He's in the process of searching for new work in a new city and is going through some similar things. I told him then that we needed to motivate each other, and maybe that's just what I need: a whole host of people I know and love to push me to snap out of it. Or maybe I can just know and love me? And push myself to snap out of it? Question mark?
Good thing I just checked Snap out of It: To Know and Love and Push One's Self, Maybe? out from the library.