Yin and Yang
First, thank you to all of you who posted such lovely thoughts to Baby Girl. She appreciated it very much. You are a wonderful little group of bloggers and writers.
And now . . . I'm searching for a little peace. Not world peace. Though that I would like. But inner peace.
You see . . . I don't know if you think parenting four kids, writing full-time etc. is paradise. My guess is my Demon Baby stories have definitely acted as a form of birth control for many a person. But I do love my life. However, there's been some BIG STRESS in the House of Orloff lately. Oddly enough, the events have knit my kids even closer to me, so maybe there really is that silver lining. But . . . we as a family have had our share of difficult times lately. So much so that I, as Mom, feel as if two ten-ton blocks of granite have been placed on me--one on my shoulders. The other sitting in my stomach.
But today I woke up . . . and realized . . . it was a writing day. And sometimes, well, it's a battleground. Sometimes writing is just banging my head against a desk, going "What the hell am I doing with this SCENE?!?!?!?!?!" But sometimes? I realized writing is like my secret treehouse. A place I get to go to escape. For some peace. In an imaginary world I can control. And on those days? I can't tell you how grateful I am to be a writer.
But there . . . re-reading what I wrote? It's yin and yang isn't it? A refuge . . . and sometimes the very thing that drives me nuts.
So tell me--is there a yin and yang to your writing life?
Labels: yin and yang
posted by Erica Orloff at 8:54 AM
20 Comments:
Balance, an illusive quest. Finding time to write without interuption is my quest. Weekends the family is in and out and I feel like I'm ready to jump and do at any moment. (a mommy thing, to be sure) Weekdays the boss is begging me to come in early, work late, give up my day off for special projects-been doing that since July!
Balance? What's that? And how you do it with 4 kids is beyond me! I only have two and they're older now, but I still stress out about doing things for them.
Yin & Yang? More like grab it while I can! lol
Erica, definitely Yin and Yang! Family and writing is my journey, and I won't travel without either. So, balance is something that fits some days, others it's MIA. LOL. I do hope things smooth out for you. You give so much to your family, and this writing community here. Wish I could send you on a spa day!
I love the idea of a manuscript as your own little place where you can play. Right now I'm struggling in the writing, and I need to get back to thinking about it as a fun place to play. Sometimes it seems like an every-other-day thing: one day the writing goes easily and is so much fun, and the following day, as if I've been all tapped out, every word is a struggle.
I'm not sure I have Yin and Yang in my writing life. Everything seems all mixed up together.... and I can't tell if there's balance or not.
The one thing I do know is that if I don't write for a few days I feel like there's something missing!
Hi Aimless:
Balance?
The word makes me crack up. There's no such thing--least not in my life. :-) BUT, I think I do accept that chaos is normal--and has its OWN rhythm. If that makes sense. And thus has its own balance. However precarious at times.
E
Ladonna:
I used to get gifts of glorious spa days from authors whose books I edited . . . I can remember not once but TWICE, not realizing they had a year until expiration, realizing my gift card/spa certificate was about to lapse. Which meant an entire year went by without me finding the time to go! LOL!
E
Hi Booklady:
I think of it as a playground most days. But others? Torture chamber.
E
sara:
Me, too. I think that's another reason I have the blog. It grounds me each morning.
E
LMAO @ demon baby stories acting as a form of birth control. :P
I'm not sure if you'd call it yin and yang, maybe you would, but I feel more overall balanced when I'm writing. There are generally two components to my life that when done actively make me feel balanced and tend to ward off the greater part of my anxieties and stress. Writing and exercise. When I'm moving both physically and mentally it has a powerful positive effect on me.
When I've been my most stressed, depressed or anxious I either have stopped moving or have stopped writing, often both.
zoe:
I am so stressed right now personally, and some of that is I haven't walked this week--unreal rain. I mean torrential. And I would go out in it, but I won't bring my puppies out in it . . . and I don't like walking without one of them. I feel safer with the company especially since I go in the very dark, very early, pre-dawn. So . . . I am sure that's not helping my stress level.
E
oh definitely Erica, walking is such a huge stress reliever. I hope the weather clears up soon for you. My parents have a treadmill that I go use during the colder months. I take my portable DVD player and watch Buffy.
Hey, Erica, I'm sending peaceful vibrations to you. I hope they knock some of that granite off your shoulders.
Writing is a substitute for the daydreaming I did when I was a kid -- although daydreaming was a lot easier. I'm at the beginning of a book, and my beginnings are always slow. Middle and end are faster, so there's my balance.
Hi Edie:
Definitely! Like daydreaming.
And email and the blog? Like how I used to get excited as a kid when I got "real" mail.
E
Great analogy. And because I have been overwhelmed with stress in my own life, I can totally relate to looking for balance. I have no balance right now, evrything seems to be in overdrive and I feel like I am always treading water. I guess I need to find away to get balance.
Hi Ello:
My life is often the same--pushing right up on the stress envelope. There are some things I can control--getting enough sleep, exercise, eating well, and so on. But some are external pressures (such as right now) which are relentless and just going to occur no matter what I do. All I can do is try to control my own reaction. Some days I am successful. Others? Not so much.
Erica, balance is like beauty - it is where you choose to see it.
But beyond that, how do we come to peace with our own lives? How do we accept that which is already there?
Everything that is in your life is there because you let it be there. Think about that for a moment. You let all the things in your life be there. If you don't want it there, then you find a way to make it go away. Making something or someone in your life wrong is silly because you are the one letting it or them be there in the first place.
Everything else is drama - good for selling books, not so good for living.
Another way to look at it is that when you are making someone wrong, you are not granting them the space to be - in other words, you are making them wrong for who they are being, and who they are not being. Or you could say that you have expectations (said or unsaid) for how other people should be, and if they do not meet these expectations (said or unsaid), you make them wrong.
Again with the drama.
The best part about all of this is that it is all based on choice... and we are all wired to be this way, to think this way.
Fun huh? :)
Everything that is in your life is there because you let it be there.
People with incurable diseases may disagree. Nevertheless Brian stresses what I believe is the most useful word in the English language: Choice.
ewoh and stephen:
I agree with Stephen. And Ewoh. LOL!
As someone with an incurable, lifelong, painful disease (Crohn's) . . . it's not there because I want it, but by a fluke of genetics. In addition, what very few people but my closest friend and my parents and children know, is after I had my fourth child, I woke up one morning about 8 days later and couldn't walk. I literally woke up thinking I could walk, put my feet to the floor, and couldn't feel anything and fell to the ground in a heap. Not only did I have Crohn's disease, but it seemed I had a second immune disorder--M.S. It went from not being able to feel my feet . . . to it progressing up to my thighs over the course of a year. I didn't want it--and it actually turned out to be a rare side effect from a Crohn's medication. (It went away after a year of hell.)
That said, what I did have a choice about, as I have always had a choice about, is my reaction to hardship. Almost two years ago, I walked away--literally--from Western medicine and now only do traditional Chinese medicine. I am completely (knock wood) in remission, almost unheard of for someone with Crohn's without any meds whatsoever.
And regardless of what happens, I always assign myself a time limit to feel sorry for myself. Not being able to feel my legs gets a full day of grief. Something else, like a book rejection, I allot five to ten minutes, tops. When the time limit is over, I am over it. It's time to move on because what's done is done amd now it's time to face reality. I always have a choice in how I react, which is what Ewoh is saying with the drama thing, which is what the Dalai Lama says.
But that said, I loathe some of the self-help crap out there that says people who are sick somehow aren't either "believing" themselves well, praying hard enough, haven't resolved some childhood trauma, whatever.
So that's my half a cent from experience.
:-)
E
Ohmigosh, Erica, that's why I HATE stuff like The Secret! There's lots of snippets of wisdom (generally speaking, a whole self-help book usually offers between one - five bits of wisdom that could fit in one sentence each) in self-help books, and I love to read them for that reason.
But the whole heal yourself by thought thing made me, for YEARS, go around PRETENDING I was well. And when it was clear I wasn't, I would feel like a HUGE failure because I didn't believe enough and wasn't strong enough to WILL it away.
So I agree; I loathe it, too.
(Sorry for the rant. It must be that time of month because I just ranted on my own blog.)
What I meant to say was that this Yin-Yang thing sounds like your life. :-) What did you say a few days ago? That you sometimes had really bad luck that was often paired with HUGE blessings?
That's what my friends used to say about me. That they didn't know anyone with worse luck, or such good luck in getting out of the bad luck, LOL.
Spy:
All that you said. Amen.
E
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