Fail

Okay, so I realize it wasn't really a poem, "Super," which was my last post. It may be part of a poem, or just a crafted sentence to slip into a story some day. It was an awareness that had crept up on me and I had to write it down.

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose. -Samuel McChord Crothers

I hope that's not all I was doing. I don't think so; poetry comes more naturally to me than most other writing. But I haven't written creatively in a while, no new poems or stories and it worries me. Granted, I have been in a sort of emotional cocoon. I am almost constantly in motion, from work to getting the kids to school, though I don't seem to accomplish much. The Christmas tree still needs to be undecorated, the ornaments put away for next year and the tree put out to recycling.

Honestly? I'm afraid to stop. For more than a year, I have been hard at work at changing the way I think (no victims live here anymore!), changing my relationships, changing my life. Having experienced at least periods of major depression for most of life, controlled now by meds, I have the fear that if I am still for too long, I won't even be able to get out of bed. There have been times when I was close, but never quite that bad. I can't have that, now, not with kids who depend on me.

I don't believe I'm close to that, not quite. Only, I'm so tired. All I really want is to regroup, but life keeps going, so I have to keep going, too. Maybe that's exactly what keeps the complete paralysis at bay.

...one got used to it - to being everlastingly tightened up to face things, you see.
- Harriet Vane Wimsey, in Busman's Honeymoon (Dorothy L. Sayers)

The point to everything has been to create a life to live, not merely to bear. I think I'm getting there. In the meantime, I realized I never post poems or stories, or fragments of them. It was time to make that change; better to post things that aren't so good and get better than to hold off and never get there.