Greetings.
May was a hard month. I took a gig that became some of the hardest work I have done. It was an evening shift doing janitorial. The hours 4pm to 11, go go go the whole time. I lost half a pant size doing that. The pay was a pittance. Had I been feeling any more established with the temp agency I suspect I would have turned it down.
It should be no surprise that those hours were punishing on my body. There was no way for me to get sleep at the correct hours of the night, to make the 6.5 to 7 hours I need to function I had to sleep till nearly 9am. A state of affairs that left me groggy, and feeling that the day was wasted even before its started. The start time at 4 pm had two problems. No amount of spare time in the day preceding work felt free, the clock was always being watched. So I never took to doing any thing productive. Writing was seldom a viable option. Between the feeling of being poorly rested and the watching the clock I failed to be productive, excuses.
The second trouble with starting work at 4pm was, well that is when I start getting seriously hungry for my evening meal. The first half of the shift was spent in a state of being punchy. With the work being so physical it was difficult to eat enough, I nearly resigned myself to being hungry all the time.
So May was spent with my feet hurting, my temper short and my stomach underfilled, pushing water up hill to try to make the rent. But rent I did make. So the impending doom of the months end was met with relief when the rent cheque cleared. I made it I squeaked by, but I earned the rent the hard way. With that real victory my brain started to open up.
The skeleton of a plan I have for this phase of life is, get by. Get by and write. Only after proving getting by is possible can I set aside the over sized patch of brain that worried and let in the creative.
I have been blessed these last two weeks, my work is normal hours, at better rate, the job neither punishes my body or my brain. To know June will go better than May and to find the brain power to reenter the sprawling worlds of my novel feels great. The scary thing has to be faced, that to write at the richness the worlds deserve requires me to go a little extra crazy. To write the novel with the feels I need requires me to visit memories and moods that leave me on edge. But right now I have the room in my mind to start playing with it again.
1 comment:
Yes! I fully recognise you are a grown man with no need for parental approval. But I have to say it any way. I am so effing proud of how you are coping with the tough times. You seem to have a fine sense of what you are personally responsible for and which of your misfortunes are due to factors beyond your control. There will be books. Yes.
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