Day: March 9, 2018

I am here at the house of my friend, far away from the house that is my home. I’ve come for a writer’s retreat in the company of multiple people that I don’t get to see nearly often enough. I’ll be here for five days and for every single one of them I am outside the context of my regular life. And that is the point. I am here to be outside my usual patterns and responsibilities. I am here to rest the organizational, task-responsible portion of myself while allowing a different portion of myself room to expand.

I’ve done retreats before. Anxiety always gets loud while I am at them. Less so as I’ve repeated going on them, because I have demonstrable proof that me “abandoning” my home responsibilities does not inevitably end in disaster. My first retreat was about seeing the extent of my anxiety and not allowing it to send me home early. Just staying was a triumph that I didn’t fully recognize until months later. Follow on retreats were about learning the shapes of that anxiety and seeing the ways that my home life made me tired so that I had the chance to go home and alter my at-home patterns.
This time I’m in a place I’ve been before with people who I’ve known for years both online and in person. I am outside my comfort zone, but I’ve come to a place that is also comfortable. I’m curious to see whether this retreat will finally focus on writing rather than anxiety and emotional processing.

I spent the weeks prior to this trip scrambling to get things done before going. The one thing I did not do was figure out what creative project I plan to focus on during this trip. What will I write? I have several possible answers. There are creative projects in my brain that are waiting patiently for me to pick them up again.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to describe how differently I view projects-in-waiting than I used to do. There were large portions of my creative life where I was frustrated and grieving over the time that I spent on things that were not me creating fiction in my own worlds. I don’t feel that way any more. The work I put into setting up our new online store is largely tedious data entry, but every minute I spend there improves our ability to sell items, which supplies income, which means I can pay bills, which means I have a house/heat/electricity, so that I can write words. Administrivia is in direct support of any creative work that I do. From January until May of this year is going to be administrivia heavy because I’m doing some foundational work (store infrastructure changes) that will create more breathing room for creative work than I’ve had. The admin and organizational work is important and it is satisfying in a way that is different from writing. I’m not certain I would be fully happy as a creative person if I had endless time for writing. I think I need to organize and administer as much as I need to write.

But these next five days are a small space that I’ve deliberately created to allow myself to explore those on hold projects. I’m always reluctant to state goals out loud. I’m not sure why. I always have them, but I self motivate rather than using friendly help from peers. However this is a retreat for stepping outside my usual habits. So, tomorrow I will:
Go for a walk in the woods
Take some photographs
Maybe write up a post or two about thoughts related to the walk and photographs
Pull out my files of picture book ideas and refresh my thoughts on them
Write some words on one of those picture books
Look at the fragments of blog posts and essays that I never completed
Pick one thing to write up as a full essay
Generate ideas for a short story or two
Read a book
Help my son with an essay over speaker phone because that is the one last home thing that I do need to allow to encroach into this retreat.

That is a list of ten things. If I do six of them, I get a reward in the evening.