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Nov. 24th, 2008 01:23 amI'm doing a lot better for the past week or so.
I credit a combination of realizing WHY I was acting and feeling the way I was before; writing, talking and crying that out to such a degree; and stopping eating sugar and white flour which just helps tremendously with consistent energy levels and mood swings.
I am also aware it could just be temporary, and almost sure I have at least a couple of downswings still coming even if it's not. But, progress.
My main shift has been in trying, very consciously, to live each day to the fullest and keep my heart open. Even if I'm going to die tomorrow, even if everything I do can be undone, etc. I've been crying a lot more easily and often, but also in this very brief and transient and not necessarily sad way, if that makes any sense. I have NOT been having the horrible empty what is the point crying JAGS. I've just been tearing up a lot, half from happiness or empathy or whatever. It's an improvement for sure.
We've had the Book Fair, and the Green Festival, and soccer games, and Knaus Berry Farm, and just lots of good things and good days since I was MISERABLE last. CLean house, meal planning for the first time in forever, generally feeling on track. I made everyone hot chocolate and ginger snaps on their saucers tonight.
I am going to be pitching our tiddlywinks small town newspaper an idea for an ongoing column, in addition to some sample articles in advance. They are often desperate for material, I've written for them without credit before when someone I know was behind on a deadline and it passed through just fine, and I'm not expecting to be paid, so I imagine I am a shoe-in, what with my mother in law working there and all :p She's just in ads and I don't know if she really has any clout, the point is just that I figure it's a good way to pay my dues in the form of getting some publishing credentials in my hand. Then I can start pitching my anecdotal little parenting editorials to relatively low grade publications like Miami Family as "a columnist at the South Dade Newsleader" and THEN I can be a columnist for The South Dade Newsleader and contributor to Miami Family, when I go to pitch my editorial and column ideas to, say, Parents magazine. So after Nancy has my c-section book in her hand in 10 or 11 months, I should be a shoe in for an agent for all this other stuff I have laying around, right? It's good to have a plan, anyway. I am completely prepared to get rejection letters, and to have to edit and re-edit and scrap some ideas - I even have a back-up idea for a different column if the paper doesn't want my initial one - but as long as I eventually get somebody saying yes, I think I can handle it. I understand that even legendary authors had a lot of rejection to wade through before anyone heard them out.
I've been thinking about this writing stuff a lot lately. I won a lot of silly awards in elementary school for writing. I longhand wrote about half of a fictional novel that was mostly descriptive detail about a super fancy house, that my grandfather was typing for me at work, but I got so upset about him editing it without my permission that I quit. Then I got a poem vanity published in an anthology only available to me by purchasing it for $65 (I was 10 and hadn't really understood what I was entering well enough). Once I was about 11, I started writing poetry all the time. I got in the local paper - the tiddylwinks one - in middle school for a play I wrote, and got a ribbon at the Youth Fair for a monologue, and then after a lot of As on essays and great marks on my Florida Writes test and STACKS UPON STACKS of poems, only a few really good but most "alright"...I got swept away in the whirlwind that has been my life ever since. I wrote some term papers for people and did the uncredited writing I mentioned as a favor. I got paid for a press release I wrote for someone once. I wrote a shamefully honest, autobiographical, hysterical fit of a novel when Ananda and Aaron were toddlers. I let a few people read it and they all said they loved it, but they were all my friends.
It's sobering and sort of scary, how close it all seems again now.
( cats )
I credit a combination of realizing WHY I was acting and feeling the way I was before; writing, talking and crying that out to such a degree; and stopping eating sugar and white flour which just helps tremendously with consistent energy levels and mood swings.
I am also aware it could just be temporary, and almost sure I have at least a couple of downswings still coming even if it's not. But, progress.
My main shift has been in trying, very consciously, to live each day to the fullest and keep my heart open. Even if I'm going to die tomorrow, even if everything I do can be undone, etc. I've been crying a lot more easily and often, but also in this very brief and transient and not necessarily sad way, if that makes any sense. I have NOT been having the horrible empty what is the point crying JAGS. I've just been tearing up a lot, half from happiness or empathy or whatever. It's an improvement for sure.
We've had the Book Fair, and the Green Festival, and soccer games, and Knaus Berry Farm, and just lots of good things and good days since I was MISERABLE last. CLean house, meal planning for the first time in forever, generally feeling on track. I made everyone hot chocolate and ginger snaps on their saucers tonight.
I am going to be pitching our tiddlywinks small town newspaper an idea for an ongoing column, in addition to some sample articles in advance. They are often desperate for material, I've written for them without credit before when someone I know was behind on a deadline and it passed through just fine, and I'm not expecting to be paid, so I imagine I am a shoe-in, what with my mother in law working there and all :p She's just in ads and I don't know if she really has any clout, the point is just that I figure it's a good way to pay my dues in the form of getting some publishing credentials in my hand. Then I can start pitching my anecdotal little parenting editorials to relatively low grade publications like Miami Family as "a columnist at the South Dade Newsleader" and THEN I can be a columnist for The South Dade Newsleader and contributor to Miami Family, when I go to pitch my editorial and column ideas to, say, Parents magazine. So after Nancy has my c-section book in her hand in 10 or 11 months, I should be a shoe in for an agent for all this other stuff I have laying around, right? It's good to have a plan, anyway. I am completely prepared to get rejection letters, and to have to edit and re-edit and scrap some ideas - I even have a back-up idea for a different column if the paper doesn't want my initial one - but as long as I eventually get somebody saying yes, I think I can handle it. I understand that even legendary authors had a lot of rejection to wade through before anyone heard them out.
I've been thinking about this writing stuff a lot lately. I won a lot of silly awards in elementary school for writing. I longhand wrote about half of a fictional novel that was mostly descriptive detail about a super fancy house, that my grandfather was typing for me at work, but I got so upset about him editing it without my permission that I quit. Then I got a poem vanity published in an anthology only available to me by purchasing it for $65 (I was 10 and hadn't really understood what I was entering well enough). Once I was about 11, I started writing poetry all the time. I got in the local paper - the tiddylwinks one - in middle school for a play I wrote, and got a ribbon at the Youth Fair for a monologue, and then after a lot of As on essays and great marks on my Florida Writes test and STACKS UPON STACKS of poems, only a few really good but most "alright"...I got swept away in the whirlwind that has been my life ever since. I wrote some term papers for people and did the uncredited writing I mentioned as a favor. I got paid for a press release I wrote for someone once. I wrote a shamefully honest, autobiographical, hysterical fit of a novel when Ananda and Aaron were toddlers. I let a few people read it and they all said they loved it, but they were all my friends.
It's sobering and sort of scary, how close it all seems again now.
( cats )
