All in good time

David Hockney, A Bigger Splash

Hi everyone, it’s Fall and I am suddenly feeling closer to myself than I did all summer. This happens every year. Summer is chaotic and confusing and makes me feel like I should be outside running around doing everything and everything even when I might not feel like it. But Fall makes me feel centered. Almost like clockwork, the way I spend my time changes. I go through a book a week, start writing more, start smiling more and feel more centered. Maybe it’s the slight shift in temperature, maybe it’s a memory of the school year, but whatever it is, I love it.

I’m going to try an experiment here just to push my edges a bit—and I’m going to be really honest. Not so much about family stuff, but about everything else. Blame my reading too much (is there such a thing) of Karl Ove Knausgaard. I like the exercise of morning pages for this reason though if anyone were to ever read those—yikes. To write in one solid flow from thought to fingers without letting that jerk voice get too loud. The one who tells me over and over that this is all pointless. We all have that voice, that jerk lives rent free.

Also something else that happens for me in Fall is thinking about what the year has brought and what I want to accomplish in the coming year. I’ll admit, because I’m trying to be really honest, that I find myself wondering if and when I will ever be in a romantic relationship again. Right now I feel completely ambivalent about it. I want one, it sounds lovely, but it’s not something I’m chasing. I think turning 40, as I just did on the 31st of last month, has me thinking a lot about midlife things. For some reason this birthday really felt like 40. It’s an age you can’t run from. 34, 35, 36 are kind of vague deadlines, but 40 is officially middle aged. I found myself that week instincivly shedding things that I didn’t want to take into this next decade with me. I confronted friends who I thought were friends and turned out they weren’t. I deleted all of my ex husbands domains which he so foolishly kept under my account for the last four years, despite me having left him five years ago. It’s really made me take stock of who my real friends are—the friends who make me feel safe to be myself, the friends who really know me and love me still. And it also made me think about my writing. I know I’m not here much, and like I say in every post, I want to change that.

I realize I’m lacking in the radical self belief dept and missing the delusion needed to charge ahead. I had that for years, or I had it briefly anyway. I’m not sure how to get it back and maybe it’ll come in the midst of working. I did have a brief and glorious moment this past week when I dug out all my book notes and randomly wrote the last few sentences of my book. This is pretty silly considering I don’t really have a book, I have a proposal which will then ideally lead me to having a real book, one that is sold and contracted. I wrote the last few sentences for that non existence thing, and damn they are so good.

Perhaps this isn’t surprising, especially to any creative reading this, but I guess I forgot that making our art contains a few important elements—fun. It should be fun. If it’s not fun, why even bother. It requires us to let go, constantly, minute by minute of whatever our expectations are of ourselves and our work. Like my friends who’ve all published books remind me, the book I sold is not the book I wrote. Things morph as we work on them, and they do so because we are morphing, constantly changing and we’d be foolish to think that our changes wouldn't show up in our work, what we value, what we find interesting, and what brings us joy.

The reality for me is that what I find interesting, and what brings me joy has changed a bit over the last couple of years. But what I can’t figure out is, are these things less joyous and interesting to me because I feel like I can’t have them? I can’t spend the time with them like I want to? Or because *I* am different. And if I really am so different, I have to give myself the time to get to know who I am at 40.

Speaking of knowing new versions of ourselves. Yesterday I started and finished this book called The Most by Jessica Anthony. It’s about a woman who gets in the pool at her apartment complex and refuses to come out. It’s set in the 1950’s, she’s married to a man named Virgil and they have two sons. One day they all go off to church and she decides to stay home. It’s an abnormally hot day in November and she decides to go swimming. What happens over the next 130 pages is like being in the fast lane of someone’s life. It’s a really powerful book and if I say more about it I’ll spoil it. But halfway through the narrator is explaining this woman’s feelings and she writes, “Kathleen felt as though she were a constantly shifting landscape, inside and out. It was all profoundly unfair.” I don’t have to be Kathleen to relate. I feel the same way about my body, my outer life and inner life. It all shape-shifts so quickly it’s hard to keep tabs on what has changed day by day. I find this deeply insufferable and also fascinating. Life is a great unfolding, a great unraveling, a great revealing, a great punch in the face.

Before I sat down to write this I was listening to a song called All in Good Time and while I’ve listened to this version a lot, something about it today felt very personal-like a reminder from the universe, or from Fiona herself, that things take the time they take. And that’s OK. Whether it’s a book, a proposal before the book, a lasting loving partnership, friendships, whatever it is. Sometimes we just really have to be patient and if needed, spend all day in the pool.

If you got this far, thank you for listening.

x,

S