Allowing the Writer Within to Shine Through

It just hit me: I’m a writer.

It seems pretty silly that I’ve been blogging here at WorkLoveLife for eight months now, and I’ve only just realized that I’m a writer. This is not unique to me, I know. As blogging becomes more and more popular, others I read have questioned at what point you become a writer. And still others have argued against calling yourself a blogger at all.

I’ve come to realize in the past few months that writing has a place in my soul. It allows me to purge, it allows me to mull and remember, and it allows me to connect. And I love words. I took Latin throughout high school, which really boosted my vocabulary. I love the idea in linguistics that the more words we know, the more efficiently and effectively we are able to communicate. I love finding the perfect word or set of a words that most accurately conveys what I’m trying to say. And I even like that I can’t always find them… indescribable is a good place to be, in my book.

But today, I realized that I am writer. Not just a blogger or a lover of words or a novice, even.

The past few days have been hectic – work is hectic and I have meeting and appointments crammed into every nook and cranny of my waking hours. This evening is my first free evening since Friday. I have a half-marathon I signed up for in two weeks that I am ill-prepared for. Tonight could be a night for training. But when I asked myself do you want to run or do you want to write? Would you like to do the half-marathon or would you like to write? The answer reverberated throughout my head: We want to write.

So I didn’t bring my running clothes. I brought my laptop. Because when I neglect my running, I don’t feel half so unbalanced as when I neglect my writing.

I’d like to be a great many things in my life, and I imagine I wouldn’t be great at many of them, but it sure would be fun. My life coach says that I should honor the Holly Who Writes if I want to – I don’t have to be the Holly Who Runs Marathons right now. That’s pretty amazing to me. I thought if I was one, I couldn’t be the other.

I know that the Holly Who Runs Marathons is inside of me, but right now, it’s time for the Holly Who Writes to shine through. Not everything has to be done at once, and not everything has to be done to the nth degree. What a concept.

Photo courtesy Shiny Things via Flickr Creative Commons.

A schedule monger no longer

When I was in high school and college, I did not doodle fruitlessly as so many other students did. Well, I did that too, but I what I really loved was making schedules of my to-do lists. Take your typical to-do list, put it on steroids and map it across the hours. I made to-do schedules for the rest of the day (drawn up in quarter-hours and containing items like “eat dinner” and “read Being and Time pgs 48-101) all the way up to the month, semester, even year (divided up by months and containing items like “graduate” and “find job”).

It soothed me. When I got my new job (15 months ago now) and started my various other jobs, meetings, dating, etc. I bought a good old paper day tracker and carried it with me everywhere. It’s pretty cool to look back to a year ago and see what I was doing then. It is way more detailed than my memory.

Lately, though, my schedule-making hasn’t been soothing me.

Ever since Date #4 and I became exclusive, the art of scheduling has started to elude me. Some of you might say this is a good thing, that being so scheduled is being too rigorous and well, uptight. Date #4 is not a plans kind of guy, which does get under my skin a bit. I don’t think either of us is right or wrong, like I might’ve believed in the past (pre-sobriety); it’s just a difference in the way we live our lives. The cool thing is that he recognizes it and understands me. The other morning, for example, I asked if he was staying over later that night. He wasn’t sure. Around lunch, he still didn’t know: “I know you don’t like not knowing, but I’m still not sure yet.” I was OK with that. I merely wanted to know whether or not I should go ahead and fix dinner for myself.

So, part of the problem is that since Date #4’s plans are never settled, I don’t feel settled. If it were up to me, I would have everything through this weekend planned. It’s very uncomfortable for me to not even know whether or not he’s going to be in town, if we're going to hang out, etc. Not because of him, but because schedules soothe me. They are predictable and I know what to expect. The underlying roots of this are actually one of the things I’m working on with my counselor.

The real reason my schedule-making hasn’t had the soothing effect I’m used to getting is that now that I realize why it is that I do it. I also realize that becoming upset when things don’t go according to plan and sticking to it for the sake of sticking to it are just manifestations of a perceived threat, that threat being inconsistency and instability, which are not actually present in my life.

Looking back at a post from just a few months ago, I realize how far I’ve come. And that in itself soothes me.

Looking foolish along the way

Eating crow: humiliation by admitting wrongness or having been proven wrong after taking a strong position

Eat humble pie: to apologize and face humiliation for a serious error

I’m not sure either of these describes exactly how I feel, but they come close. I had a particularly, and unexpectedly, emotional day. Around noon, I learned that a friend’s sister overdosed last night. I didn’t know the sister, but this recovering alcoholic can tell you that there is something about hearing that this disease has claimed another person that shakes you at your core. I believe it was that shaken state that allowed everything to bubble up to the surface.

I can’t write list posts or tell you how to get through your first day of work or even how to make more room in your life for love. The only real thing I have to offer is a candid view of the way I live my life, and to be as achingly honest about it as possible. And I’ve been wrong. About several things.

It started innocently enough. I stopped by Old Navy on my way home from work to pick up a pair of pajama shorts since it’s become clear to me that Date #4 will not take the hint and leave behind the necessary boyfriend boxers I would prefer to sleep in. While there, I decided to be a good auntie to my cousin’s 1-year-old daughter and pick up a few cute little things. I dumped it all on the bed when I got home, changed into my new shorts (ah…) and stared at the clothes. They were so cute, so little, and I couldn’t wait to see her in them. A feeling started to come up… and I shoved it back down.

All day, I’d been shoving it back down.

The loss of my friend’s sister stirred up my still-raw emotions over the loss of my friend Maureen back in March. I shoved it back down. Date #4 not being able to spend his birthday weekend with me stirred up feelings of jealousy, resentment and fear. I shoved it back down. As I stared down at the little girl’s clothes, it stirred up emotions of something I’d lost years ago, and I shoved that down too.

But it wouldn’t stay down.

As I tried to finish going about my night (I needed to blog, get my work and running clothes ready, make some concrete business decisions…), it just wouldn’t stay down. Something wasn’t right. It’s been this way for a few months but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I thought it was maybe my sinuses, maybe not exercising, not having my work and life balanced just the right way or not doing the right kind of work. I searched, all the while shooing away this nagging feeling that I wasn’t working something important out. Shoved it down.

It came up. All at once.

I miss Maureen and her death has affected me. I can’t ignore that. I don’t want to feel that pain because it is so very strong. I am missing a friend, a person who totally got me, who gave to me and took from me, to whom I told “I love you” every time we said goodbye. I wasn’t dealing with those feelings, that grief. I ignored it.

What I really want when I imagine a good, fine life for myself is to own my own café, just as I envisioned it in December, an airy cozy shop full of funky vintage furniture, good coffee and an owner (me!) who knows everybody. I would be in a cool town, maybe not too big but too small. Somehow I got the notion into my head that it just wasn’t grand enough a business for a smarty-pants like me. So I shelved it, said it was best left for retirement.

The most startling realization to you, my readers, might be what else I see in this picture. As I run my own successful café, I very clearly see children running around my shop. I want children. Three years ago, I was an alcohol who could not bring myself to bring a child into my world. That experience has been far more impacting than I ever thought, and fear has driven me in that regard.

I realize now that when it comes to the emotional things in my life, it’s going to take much longer to heal than I thought. It wouldn’t say much about my friendship with Maureen if I weren’t still moved to tears a mere five months later. I am. It wouldn’t be treating my disease with enough respect to think that the choices I made years ago because of my drinking would just go away on their own. They haven’t.

As to my business choices, I think I simply veered off course looking for something perhaps a little more glamorous, a little more grand than my simple dream of owning my own coffee shop. But now that I’m back there, it’s like a warm blanket, familiar and just right.

In some respects, I’m back where I was in December, which isn’t necessarily bad. I feel a little sheepish, a little humbled admitting that my ego inflated as I attempted to fluff myself up to meet these grand ideas. I don’t always know what I’m doing. I thought I was just putting on a brave face. When I put a brave face on, I only fool myself. And fool myself, I did.

Life is a tricky thing. I’m skeptical of anyone who says they’ve got it all figured out. Especially in these early years, as we try to form ideas of who we want to be and how we can become those people, certainly we’ll look a little foolish along the way. I guess I’m just happy to be trying.

Work/love balance: The new work/life balance struggle

When I began to hear the phrase “work/life balance” thrown around, I figured it didn’t apply to me. It was my older coworkers with family who mostly used it. Work/life balance meant “time with the kids and spouse.” So I dismissed it. It had nothing to do with me, single childless Holly who has the energy to work three or four jobs and train for marathons.

Then I got a boyfriend.

Anyone who has read this blog for the past 8 weeks or so knows that I’ve struggled to keep everything on my plate plus boyfriend on the side, but things keep slipping off like some overly eager kid’s plate at the dessert buffet. I’ve talked to friends, mentors, even a life coach, listed my priorities, and promptly removed… nothing.

There are so many things I want to pursue that I can’t imagine cutting anything. It’s asking a lot that I’m not adding anything. 

So, I’ve struggled to show the boyfriend that I am committed to us, that I’m willing to put in the time, that I want to spend time together. Actually, that might not be true. I think all I’ve really done is figured out ways to carve out pieces of the week where I can relax or do some work with him. At any rate, this is a new class of balancing act for me – the work/life balance.

Huh? Work-what balance? To me, life and work are fairly seamlessly integrated. I’m not sure what I’d rather be doing on a Sunday besides sitting in my favorite café with a hot chocolate, blogging my guts out. Who wouldn’t want to be integrating a printer into a wireless network on a Tuesday evening? I can honestly say that most nights I would rather be slinging coffee than watching television on the couch.

Instead of saying “Life? What life?” I have “Work? What work?” Unfortunately, it does take up a lot of time though, and I wonder at the end of the day what kind of energy I have leftover for my relationship – for love. I would say the majority of nights I dive headlong into my bed and I’m literally lights out before the BF flips the switch.

So what does this new work/love balance thing mean? I’m not really sure. I can’t say I’ve got it figured out. Perhaps it’s a sign of my youth, but mostly fear swirls around it. If you’re in love, should you place a higher value on that rather than your work? Should one or the other be the entrée and the other the side dish? Is it a matter of finding a person who makes you want to stop spending so much time on your work, makes you think it’s the higher value automatically? Is my relationship to my work and career so perverse that I should just give up on love altogether?

In all honesty, I am sometimes struck with the fear that my work is my only one true love in life. I have no doubt that God made me and business out of the same clay, sprinkling entrepreneurship in my blood like stars in the sky. It’s always there for me, ready to make my day, impatient when I’m away and greeting me with new ideas and excitement. Where does love fit into my already-existent love affair with work?

I glance at the title of my website, WorkLoveLife. People have asked me if that’s how I prioritize the three, if it means anything special. Honestly, it was the only combination of those three words available for a domain name. But, maybe that is it’s significance in my life – at the end of the day, I make work, love and life fit together the only way available to me.

Photo by RaidersLight.