Once again it’s five am. A bunch of songs run through my head about early mornings but I can’t catch most of them. Thankfully today isn’t starting out as an ear worm day.
Instead, I’m soaking in the feeling of coziness with my coffee and my TENS machine on my bad foot. It’s my bad foot because it slows me down when I don’t want it to. We’ve talked about it before, but apparently, the foot gets to hurt whenever it wants to, no matter what I feel about it.
So, enforced rest this morning gives me time to sit and think instead of running. It’s not a bad thing, but sometimes it’s less comfortable than running a marathon, depending on what needs to be dealt with.
I think we all have those times where our brain gets too full of what needs to be done, and the thoughts start to get jumbled together. I’m trying to declutter my life at the moment, inspired by the KonMarie technique of tidying. (I haven’t actually started tidying yet, but I am considering it, which is further than I usually get)
Part of that decluttering for me includes getting all the extra thoughts out of my head that are adding to the weight we all carry around with us. On any given moment, I can be simultaneously worrying about the kids, work, my foot, my diet, my weight, am I being lazy? Being late, getting time to write, will I ever get published? That looks yummy but I don’t want diabetes so I’m not going to eat it.
Ok, reading that list exhausts me and that was only what’s currently in my head. I think I’m getting to the age where people used to have a midlife crisis. I’m not sure if they are still calling it that though- it sounds very 80s in my head. I think people call it a life change or reawakening or some other fancy term now.
For me, I think my life shifted the second I found out I was pregnant with my first. Not so much a midlife crisis as a ‘giving life’ change in my priorities. We all think we know what to expect, and from a medical perspective there wasn’t any surprises. But my emotional capacity changed overnight, becoming so much more than I imagined. It wasn’t about me and my feelings now, it was about this amazing miracle of nature, and how was I going to keep them safe, which in turn opened up all of my emotions to everyone around me as well.
Pregnancy shifted everything. It was around five months pregnant when I realized that I couldn’t work the way I had been. I wanted to be part of my kids lives and raise them, try to be there for bedtimes and mornings. So work had to change. I wasn’t interested in working shifts, or doing a week of call, and I wanted a safer home where our kids could play outside. (Not where they would learn about the birds and bees in the backyard, which happened once in our driveway. But that’s another story)
So we decided to move provinces, to a place 12 hours away that I didn’t know much about.
This was a huge undertaking in so many ways. It’s taken me several years but I finally feel that I’m home. We’ve made some friends, and I finally feel more settled into work, and felt happy.
But then I began to get that restless feeling again. The feeling telling me that things aren’t finished yet, something was missing.
I used to get almost the same feeling when it was time to have another baby, but this time I was completely content on that front. I’ve hit the maximum number I can cope with and the biological clock has had its batteries removed, thank you very much.
It took me awhile to figure it out. It came in a whim to buy a writing magazine at Chapters, and seeing the add for nanowrimo to realize what the feeling was. I’d been spending all of my time on kids and work and the mechanics of the day that I hadn’t noticed that the creative part of my soul had been locked away in storage.
November 2015 was when I started to become a writer. I’ve always loved reading and could easily read up to ten books a week when I was younger. This hasn’t been the case since having children, as they won’t let me while they are awake and I’m too tired when they go to bed, but I’m still working on it.
I’ve also always loved writing. Since I learned how to read I’ve loved creating my own worlds and trying to make them real for myself and others. In university my favourite course was creative writing, but it never seemed practical to do it for a living.
(Seriously, it was like telling people I was going to be a rock star or a famous race car driver. Some people do that, but most can’t pay their rent, and that wasn’t logical for me.)
So as life got busier with medical school and then work, then family, that dream was tucked away.
Until it came bursting out again in the form of a book, then two, then three and now I’m working on my fourth. Not published, but starting to try. And finally I feel I have started to feed that piece of my soul that has been hungry.
I’m in the process of becoming and I love it, and hope that I continue, that I not only get published someday but that I continue to create for the rest of my life.
All of the pieces finally coming together. And I like what I see so far.