“As I flipped through the pages, the scent of paper printed over the last decade reminded me of a line of excellent hair products I could no longer afford to buy.”
Besides my sporadic, emotionally-charged journal entries, and one night where inspiration wrestled me from my sleep and commanded me to whip out my notebook near midnight, this is the only thing I’ve jotted down on paper since I graduated from college last May.
And I’ve complained and complained about not having the time or energy to write. Most people tell me that’s true. They are completely in the right when they remind me that I’ve had a lot going on these last eight or nine months.
I’ll explain as briefly as I can;
July was really the month when most of the things that would keep me crazed until January. The very first event was getting a part-time job at a running store.
I started the job hunt wanting a part time job, thinking it would give me time to write on the side. I was committed to sending out another round of “Keith” (a piece about my brother that I worked on throughout my last semester of school) to more literary magazines. And then the rejection got to me, so to avoid that fear, self-doubt, and all-around hardship of thinking I suck at writing, I decided I’d get some sort of publishing or editorial internship. My logical reasoning was that having another one would help me get a job in the future, and then maybe after that I could write on the side.
I got an internship online a week after I started at the store.
I hated it.
I promised to be brief, so suffice it to say that I didn’t learn anything new, and my time there was full of unprofessionalism and disorganization on the part of my boss. As an example, we had an issue with an author at one point early on in my internship, which could have resulted in us dropping the project (my sole project), and I kept having to prod my boss for updates.
I trudged through that internship, and increasingly found that I could not make the time for it either.
In October, a couple months before the internship contract would end, I went back to the part-time job I had while I was in school. It started by helping out just for a couple weeks, and I’m still there. This is where everything started to de-rail for me. I had multiple weeks with one day off, sometimes not even a full day, and I suffered immensely because of it. So did my work at all of my jobs.
When I was home, I didn’t feel like I could relax because I had to edit as many pages as I could before January came. And it was an extraordinarily awful manuscript that I was working on, which inherently demands more TLC. My running store job, which excited me at first, became a place where I quickly found was not where I belonged. I didn’t realize how much salesmanship was integrated into the very words I (was required to) use at work. It was demanding in a way I was not prepared for, and did not much care for either. It just wasn’t worth it after six months, so I quit. I now know this though; I will never work in sales again. Or for that company.
Now on top of having two out of three crappy jobs from the beginning of July to January, I had a major health change right after my birthday. At the end of July, I was diagnosed with Celiac Disease, which is an autoimmune disorder. To put it in perspective, it’s in the same family as Crohn’s Disease and IBS, but what sets it apart is that it has a known trigger; gluten.
So next time you roll your eyes at someone asking for something “gluten free”, think again.
I had to alter my entire diet, which mostly meant giving up baked goods and pizza, but also meant checking the labels on everything. Ev.Er.Y. Thing. No more pre-packaged dinners. No more McDonald’s when I’m in a rush. Nothing breaded. Check the labels on every bottle of sauce. Want to go out to dinner and be social? You may not be able to eat there because of the possibility of cross-contamination, assuming the restaurant even has gluten free options to begin with.
So yeah, I’d say that was a major, difficult life change. And I won’t lie, I cried a little bit over it. I’m still in the thick of it. To add to that, I recently found out that I’m sensitive to casein, which is found in dairy.
I grew up on mac and cheese and chicken nuggets, if that tells you anything.
I don’t want to make excuses for myself for not writing, but looking at it all written down here, taking up more space that you’ll probably want to read (thanks if you’re still with me), when was I supposed to have the time? Where was the space for me to be able to sit down with myself and battle all the self-doubt that accumulated with the rejection of the last thing, the best thing, I wrote?
I was worried about so many things apart from writing that exhausted me, never mind my fears about actually writing. For months I’ve been worried that I didn’t love it enough, or that I wasn’t really trying to make the time for it. The pressure of where I’m supposed to be versus where I actually am has intimidated me so much that I’m paralyzed when I open my laptop. I click on my browser instead of Microsoft Word, or I suddenly find that I want to solve all the puzzles in my Pandora’s Box computer game.
It’s easier than working, ignoring it. It’s easier not to try making something of nothing. The unknown is scary. But I recently read “Rising Strong” by Brene Brown, and I’m now reading “Big Magic” by Elizabeth Gilbert, intelligent ladies that have much more experience than I in these things. I think they’ll help me with not only where I am, but things I’ve been battling for years. I’m looking forward to it. It’s helping already.
