Sharing my life a bit sporadically here in a public space it’s easy to choose only the good things to share. Or then those things that externally will shock people into a reaction. But there are some thoughts that may be as common as snowflakes (I’m in the middle of a blizzard) but yet very important in a moment, or over time. Things that accumulate and that I have no words in those moments of despair, and only looking back I can express the emotion.
I’ve been doing the YWAmove 30-day-challenge with Yoga with Adriene community this month. It’s my fourth time starting, and second time actually getting through it. Today Adriene hit upon something, as she often does. The practice was called “Trust”, but in the middle of it she invited us to say to ourselves: “I belong.” I was amazed at how hard this was for me.
I guess the times and self-isolating because my work causes me to be in connection with a lot of people, have led me to a feeling of not belonging. Though this is not recent and I’ve been struggling with similar feelings my whole life. It works against me both in whether I assume I am not included or I’m not expected to take part or be a part of something.
An added bonus to this feeling of being apart is my life choises. I choose to work a few days a week and manage my finances so I can get by, so I can write. What a priviledge! But also, since I’m not published yet and it’s not a common decision, I feel separate. I feel a bit guilty for writing because others are struggling to get by in regular jobs and still manage to write incredible books. And I feel guilty for not writing sometimes, losing myself in a book or a tv series or a seed catalogue (more of that this Spring!). I also feel guilty when I struggle to write, as I’ve done this Winter. I have been writing, scraping the words on the page just to reach some certain amount of words or lenght of time. Not feeling that I even belong into that particular slot, feeling like even using the Twitter tags to celebrate small victories is fake and not something that I have earned.
It does pay off. I know it does, having finished one novel. I know it rationally, and I know it hopefully. And sometimes I have days of writing like yesterday and the day before that when another story took flight in my mind and spread its tentacles all over my imagination. Those are the days on which I know I belong. But they are few and far between and it’s hard to try to cultivate something when your saplings have dried out and the seeds you tried to save are not sprouting. At all.
I’ve been reading Piero Ferrucci’s book about kindness this month and it made a huge impression on me when he writes about gratitude. I’ve been keeping a gratitude journal for the past year, because, hey, it’s a pandemic, you gotta try everything and hope it works. But the book opened new doors for me in gratitude. Ferrucci writes about how, if we look at the world and our lives through gratitude, we start to realise that everything we are and what we have gained, came from someone or somewhere. We are like a huge basket of yarns that have just been thrown together, some bits as scrap, some intentionally, some lovingly, some just in case someone will need it at some point to sew up a hole. The person that forms is a tangle of those yarns. A beautiful, messy creation of all that came before. But the beautiful bit is that the yarns are still connected to all those people and events and things that made us so. (This yarn analogy is mine, by the way, in all it’s messiness.) Ferrucci talks about cells that have a semipermeable membrane.
Why did I suddenly turn course to talk about gratitude? Well, if I consider writing from that point of view, I will always belong there. Make those yarns (or molecules) bits of words, events, encouragement, books handed over, worlds created in other minds, experiences described that I have or will never have, and that makes up the thing I am most grateful about in my life. I am not someone writing. I am a writer.
So today I choked out those words: I belong. And then continued on with doing the yoga exercise, but they still resonate in my mind. And trusting that feeling, that I belong, is going to take me a long way next time I falter and flail in the quagmire that are plots and characters and just concentrating on pressing keys or moving a pen to form words. Thinking of those things that made me first pick up a pen and still makes me open the document and type every day, thinking of how my writing is made up of all these small parts, a lot of which would even exist without me, makes the whole being a writer more tangible and not just something ethereal that happens to other people.
Am I making any sense? I’m not sure I am, but that’s the thing about writing about feelings. You can get far with sense, but sensibility is still a plus.
Mayu's Teapot 