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In looking for an old flash piece that seems to have disappeared from my archives, I have been searching back through my lj posts; I used to post! And talk about stuff, and even essay a bit.
I'd blame Twitter and FB, but the fact is I am often radio silent on those channels, too. I maintain my 'hi, I'm an author, here's my work and news and stuff' website, updating it when there's news to announce, but in a lot of ways I have drawn in the last few years, my introvert self curling, fernlike, around the hollow where my heart is. While the Internets are full of amazing, they are also, especially the social channels, so full of sound and fury--signifying, truly, very little--that they feel like the most gigantic, noisy party full of horrible small talk. A thing from which an introvert must escape. As an introvert, my best, most balanced self seems to stabalize in time spent happily alone, with little breaks to be with a few people with whom and to whom I feel connected. An evening with trusted friends with the kind of conversations that roam, delve, amuse, question, celebrate, uncover wonder...
Also in going back through my lj posts, I saw the frequency with which I posted to my private journal about how painful a time I was having trying and trying and putting out my best for so many years and just not getting the writing success, the novelist career, I have been working for, for so very many years now. I'll be fifty in August and I've been at this with a will for well more than half my life.
I haven't been making those posts either, for a long while. That pain hasn't gone away, but I've been processing it differently. Some of that processing is down to a couple of good friends; some, most, of it, is letting go, over and over, letting go until it becomes more of a natural reaction to the onset of it than clenching down into myself and crying my heart out or railing against the universe--not letting go of writing or of making the effort of the business of writing, but of my attachment to what the results should look like.
The same goes for the recurrent pain of being a single person in a world of pairings.
This is a processing post; that approaching birthday is definitely raking up the muck in my river bottom/sea floor. Given that the trip I'm actually taking right around the time of that birthday is not really a happy one, not something I'm looking forward to, and not the trip to Venice I'd always meant to be taking for my fiftieth (there's only so much vacation time to be wrung out of my dayjob, so fun, restful, revivifying travel is just off the books for the rest of this year), I haven't even been able to bring myself to plan anything for the birthday. Meditate and love my friends and kitties, celebrate and enjoy writing, have a few cocktails and be glad for how much truly good and wonderful is in my life, I guess that's the plan.
Also, I'm going to try and post more here. We'll see how that goes.
I'd blame Twitter and FB, but the fact is I am often radio silent on those channels, too. I maintain my 'hi, I'm an author, here's my work and news and stuff' website, updating it when there's news to announce, but in a lot of ways I have drawn in the last few years, my introvert self curling, fernlike, around the hollow where my heart is. While the Internets are full of amazing, they are also, especially the social channels, so full of sound and fury--signifying, truly, very little--that they feel like the most gigantic, noisy party full of horrible small talk. A thing from which an introvert must escape. As an introvert, my best, most balanced self seems to stabalize in time spent happily alone, with little breaks to be with a few people with whom and to whom I feel connected. An evening with trusted friends with the kind of conversations that roam, delve, amuse, question, celebrate, uncover wonder...
Also in going back through my lj posts, I saw the frequency with which I posted to my private journal about how painful a time I was having trying and trying and putting out my best for so many years and just not getting the writing success, the novelist career, I have been working for, for so very many years now. I'll be fifty in August and I've been at this with a will for well more than half my life.
I haven't been making those posts either, for a long while. That pain hasn't gone away, but I've been processing it differently. Some of that processing is down to a couple of good friends; some, most, of it, is letting go, over and over, letting go until it becomes more of a natural reaction to the onset of it than clenching down into myself and crying my heart out or railing against the universe--not letting go of writing or of making the effort of the business of writing, but of my attachment to what the results should look like.
The same goes for the recurrent pain of being a single person in a world of pairings.
This is a processing post; that approaching birthday is definitely raking up the muck in my river bottom/sea floor. Given that the trip I'm actually taking right around the time of that birthday is not really a happy one, not something I'm looking forward to, and not the trip to Venice I'd always meant to be taking for my fiftieth (there's only so much vacation time to be wrung out of my dayjob, so fun, restful, revivifying travel is just off the books for the rest of this year), I haven't even been able to bring myself to plan anything for the birthday. Meditate and love my friends and kitties, celebrate and enjoy writing, have a few cocktails and be glad for how much truly good and wonderful is in my life, I guess that's the plan.
Also, I'm going to try and post more here. We'll see how that goes.
