Last night I was so tense my shoulders wanted to crawl up behind my ears. (This phrase is totally stolen from my friend SomebodyStrange, but it is so accurately descriptive of my current state of being, that this is the second time I’ve used it in 24 hours.) I survived the meeting about my creative writing class without incident. Link liked his new art class. I navigated dinner and getting the kids into beds before departing for writers group. My drive coincided with a huge storm front so I drove for 20 minutes dodging blown debris, watching street lamps flicker out, and playing “where is my lane?” through driving rain while simultaenously trying to find the road I wanted to turn onto.
Writers group went well. I knew I was not in a good emotional place to process the commentary that was made, so I just made notes. I’ll look over the notes and assess the situation on a day when I won’t take every comment as evidence that I should just give up this whole writing thing. That emotional state has far more to do with my current level of stress than anything that was said. After the commenting period was over there was an enjoyable conversation in which I got to participate, but mostly I just basked as intelligent conversation bandied around me. I was able to just sit without once having to get up and fetch something for a small person.
I was well and truly tired by the time I got home. I crashed into bed like a wet spaghetti noodle. Then Patches woke me up 10 times during the course of the night. Then I got up and began the morning hustle. Then I checked my email and learned that our wonderful layout guy has decided that as soon as he’s done with this book, he is also done being a layout guy. The solution is that I have to learn InDesign so that I can do the layout for the next book. I hustled the kids off to school, and my internal spring went TWANG. Apparently you can only wind those things so tight before they break. Go figure.
Once Howard picked up all my pieces and put me back together, we focused very closely on the problems for today. I’ll deal with tomorrow’s problems tomorrow. Today doesn’t have any insurmountable problems in it. First on the agenda was food. Howard provided some. Second was sleep. I went back to bed.
I slept for 3 hours. I dreamed that I was part of a play. I had to be in costume and redo my hair for it, but I was also expected to learn dance steps. Only the rehearsal rooms kept moving around and I had piles of stuff on the stage that had to be moved and I had to get in line to get a badge because the play was today.
Yeah. Having to perform, while feeling ill-prepared and unready, with rapidly changing expectations for my performance. I wonder where that came from.