Category Archives: illness

Outflow: Stand Still and Listen

Learning to stop is the hardest thing about my illness.

At primary school, our teachers utilised a very simple form of crowd control. On the first day, we were instructed about the first rule of school. If the teacher says ‘Stand Still and Listen,’ thats what you do. You stand where you are, don’t move. You open your ears and your mind, and wait for the next instuction. This was ostensibly about the need for safety, but it also meant that we learnt to pay attention.

Over the years, I have forgotten the importance of ‘Stand Still and Listen’.

Today I’ve been wondering whether ‘Stand Still and Listen’ is what my ME is here to teach me.

To listen to my body.

To listen for the pain.

To listen to my life.

To listen to the world and the people around me.

To be still, and know that I Am.

I will be gone soon enough. We all are, eventually. Better make the most of it while we are here. But that doesn’t mean a frenzied whirl of activity, filling every moment with busyness because we are afraid of death. It means savouring the moment, being mindful of NOW.

I am sure I have spoken on this theme many times on this blog, and I will do so, no doubt, over and over again in future. I struggle to learn this lesson every day. And yet, as a writer, I need to Stand Still and Listen even more than most other people. Because if I do not observe the world around me with quiet reverence, if I do not record it with compassion and objectivity in my mind and in my notebook, then how can I record it in my stories? How can I make my story worlds into believable places?

Whether you are a writer, an artist, or any other sort of creative, or whether you are someone who does not see themselves as such, take the time over the next week to practise Stand Still and Listen. Whether you actually physically stand still or not is up to you. But take a moment to be still and aware, a moment or a day or a week, or however long you need. Take stock. Be in the moment. I promise the world will grow and deepen for you when you do.

With love from the Red Tent,

Smorgesbord

On Perfectionism (and Timing)

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Carpet makers in Turkey weave a mistake into every carpet they produce because, they say, only what God makes is perfect.

A friend was trying to finish his novel.

‘So many grammatical errors,’ he moaned. ‘So many mistakes.’

He worked so hard that he wept. It would never be perfect. It would never be good enough.

All this effort, two days before he was due to be married.

There is perfectionism, and there is timing.

Perfectionism is a disease I suffer from myself. It has blocked me for years. Nothing can ever be good enough.

I set my standards so high, I never fail to fail. And then I look at what I have failed to do, and tell myself I am useless, and that I will never finish anything. Without noticing (conveniently) that I have set myself up for the perfect fall.

I am perfect at this.

So it is with this blog. It had to be perfect. It had to be faultless.

Never mind that I have a serious chronic illness that regularly prevents me from leaving the house, which affects my cognitive function to the extent that at times I can neither read nor write, nor understand what is said to me.

The blog still had to be perfect. And I had to post three times a week. Regardless.

Regardless of my health, or looking after elderly, sick parents, or my husband’s workload, or my marriage, or the weather, or having to attend friends’ weddings, or making time for much-needed holidays, or anything else that comprises having a life.

Add in the blog and perfectionism and you have a recipe for disaster. Or at least a very poorly blogger.

This is as insane as my friend trying to perfect his novel two days before one of the most important and stressful days of his life. (And happiest, lest we forget.)

Sometimes, you have to sit down and recognise that perfectionism is a disease created by Nigel. Sometimes you have to stop, and realise you haven’t been very realistic about what you can achieve.

And you have to move the bar.

Perfectionism and timing have combined to create the perfect storm in my life right now. I have been going through a bout of severe illness, and just at the start of August, the busiest month of my year so far. My mother is coming to stay for a week. Friends are getting married, and babies are being welcomed into the clan. The garden needs watering, and I have a craving to write original fiction that I have not felt in many months. With limited energy, and limited time, I can only do so much.

Conclusion: this blog cannot be perfect. It only has to be good enough.

It only has to be here to encourage you, dear reader, on your own journey of writing and creative discovery. It only has to be witness to my own creative process, as I try to navigate a way through illness and into producing a novel that will make my soul sing, and make you turn the page with delight. It doesn’t need to be the be-all and end-all of teaching writing – there are plenty of other people who can do that so much better than me.

Here are my good enough dreams:

I want to write that novel. I want to write an ebook on journaling for you, too.

WARNING: RIDICULOUS DREAM SHARE ALERT

I want to make a collectors’ edition of my novel, illustrated with my own art, for you to buy. Yes, I know, it’s crazy, but it’s something that is calling me, and somehow I know I have to follow its siren song. And you are supposed to share your creative dreams, aren’t you, to help make them happen? So I am sharing my dream with you to give it some karmic weight. (Yeah, I believe in this stuff. Bear with me.)

I also want to be well, have a holiday, enjoy some quality time with my mum, have a happy marriage (i.e. see my husband occasionally), water the garden and, well, have a life, really.

And I don’t want either perfectionism or bad timing to get in the way.

So I’ll make a deal with you:

I’m going to blog twice a week, instead of three times.

Sometimes I might only manage once, but if I do, I want you to know that the time I haven’t spent writing a blog post for you has been spent either a) getting well or, b) working on a creative project like my novel. Because the blog can’t take up all my creative energy. That just doesn’t make sense. The blog is not the purpose, it is secondary to the purpose. The purpose is the writing.

There was a time, this time last year, when I thought I would never have the courage to set up this blog. Right now, I am scared that I will never have either an ebook or a novel to offer through it. This time next year, I hope I’ll have proved at least one of those fears wrong. In the meantime, I am moving the goalposts, lowering the bar, and whatever other clichés you care to insert.

I hope that you will stick with me. I hope that you will share my journey, and tell me about yours too. I hope that we can learn this together, that we can kick Nigel into touch and fill our lives with creative joy.

Happy creating,

Outflow: What the **** am I doing?

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You may have noticed that yesterday was Wednesday and that it was eerily quiet here at Evenlode’s Friend. Oops.

Its not that I wasn’t thinking of you, believe me. Its just that, well, I won’t go into too much sordid detail here, but there are some stomach complaints that leave little room for writing blog posts. Yes, I was ill. I still am. I’ve been hit by a particularly nasty bout of IBS, and its going to take some time to settle things down again.

But of course, because I never do anything by halves, my darling husband is having a couple of days off right now and decided, for a whole bunch of really complicated reasons, that it would be a great idea for us to switch offices. Yes, while I am ill. No, he did not expect me to help move the furniture. So now he has the north-facing back room, and I have the sunny, and much larger, front room with the sofabed-futon thingey to lounge on. I suspect I may have got the best end of the deal, don’t you?

This brilliant wheeze unfortunately has its down side. Evenlode OPs Centre now looks like a cross between a bad jumble sale and the aftermath of Chernobyl. Major purge, rethink and planning are urgently required. (Shame my brain is on illness-induced sabbatical, but there we are.)

This is not entirely a bad thing, however. I need to be systematic about everything right now, and the study change is just the external materialisation of the internal mess I am in. Because it turns out that this blogging thing is much harder than it looks, and I am going to have to be a lot more organised than I thought. I can’t just fire off a post for this blog in half and hour from a standing start, as I do with my personal blog, because its not that kind of site. I want my readers to be informed, and that means my research has to be spot on and my posts thorough and thoughtful. I need to write ahead, and I haven’t worked out how I can do that and juggle my health issues and life at the same time. I think its good, on the whole, to reassess what you are doing periodically, but I’ve never been one for planning systematically how to do something, as the state of my desk drawers unvariably show.

Yes, its cosmic learning time!

So, today’s Outflow is about two things, redesigning my work area, and planning my work method. I must be mindful about what I’m going to need and the issues I am going to have to plan for, like not being well enough to write on a posting day. I’m going to need a workspace that supports me, with all the tools for writing, painting, planning and running this little endeavour within easy reach. And its got to be easy to keep tidy and organised because I am crap at being neat and perversely, as a Libran, I don’t like working in a messy, ugly space. In this way, writing a blog isn’t any different from my other creative work, my writing and painting. It just has to be more systematic and focussed.

If you keep a blog, I would love to know how you organise yourself ahead, and plan your posts. And if, like me, you are lovingly embarking on making a new creative nest for yourself, I would love to hear about that too. Please leave a reply (the tag appears at the top of each post for some reason, thats another design issue on my blog To Do list!) and maybe we can do a compendium post of all the shared ideas and wonderful ‘Rooms of Our Own’.

Happy Creating,

Journal Friday: Outflow – Making Lemonade

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Part of being a writer is the dance of self-acceptance.

I have to deal with a chronic illness, which has radically altered my life for the last fifteen years, and shows no sign of waning. This means I have to manage the delicate balance between self-care and doing too much. When I overdo it, I end up exacerbating my symptoms and have to face extended periods of bed rest and being confined to the house. Anf brain fog.

So sometimes I can’t write. And its not that I don’t want to, its just that I literally can’t.

As I have said before, however, that doesn’t mean I’m not writing. In my head, at least.

Sometimes life deals us lemons, and the lemonade is hard to make. But even when I feel like I am buried under tonnes of lemons, the dream is still there. The memory of how fantastic it feels when I am able to write, when the flow is happening and I am submerged in a scene.

This is where my diary comes in. At times when I can process language, when I can hold my pen, I write in my journal. It may only be a few lines, a sentence or two, but it is self-expression, getting the feelings out onto the page, and it feels fantastic.

At times when things are tough, my journal is my life raft.

At the moment, as I struggle with another period of sickness, I am working with this book. When I have finished squeezing every drop of goodness from it, I will tell you how I got on, a little review of sorts. In the meantime, I offer you this quote, from the marvellous SARK, patron saint of creative women, quoted by the author, Jackee Holder:

“I love journal keeping because it has helped me to discover and uncover myself, to encourage my own bravery, sort out difficulties with other people, to invent new ways of being.”

SARK, Juicy Pens, Thirsty Paper, 2008.

Happy Journalling,

evenlodesfriend

Speak Your Truth: Writing and Creativity