Issue #36 Make Good Art
A couple of housekeeping things. The new project I mentioned last time, Effing Mindfulness: Punk Rock Mindfulness, Spirituality, and Balance, is now cross-posted to my old blog's Facebook page and my primary Twitter account. Additionally, I've deactivated the poetry blog's Insta and Twitter accounts. Now some of you may be wondering how I can justify all the writing projects and not the social media and it's fairly easy to explain. Writing across various sites only takes me a few hours at a pop a couple of times a week and those posts can be post-dated so new content is always happening where as social media is ALL THE TIME and it's exhausting and spreading myself too thin. With the exception of the Jane Austen blog, whose community is fairly active, everything gets posted to my primary Twitter account and my Facebook page.
Speaking of projects, still chucking along with my poetry site. We are more than half-way through April and I haven't missed a goddamn day yet. Fuck yes. If I make it through April without missing a day, I'll be pretty proud of myself for completing a project. I hope to keep the poetry up after April ends but posting like once or twice a week and not every day.
The beginning of a poem:
gun cotton
i am celluloid nitrate
gun cotton, flash string
my teeth grind into powder
my limbs slack from remembrance
i swallow my pride, whole
choking on its honesty
Good? Bad? You decide!
With my poetry, I am writing a lot about personhood: rape, trauma, and abuse which, you know, are always joyous topics to behold. I wrote a poem about my mother to move beyond the personhood and I was apparently very angry. I'm hoping to expand my content to visualize the world around me.
Another tangentially related project is to gather the pieces after I hit at least 50 into a collection and submit them to chapbook publishers. Making zillions in the poetry market is laughable but having a profesh published book, and even if it only sells to ten people, would be delightful.
I'm also reading poetry every day (Cat Valente, Johnny Cash, Gwendolyn McEwan, Buddy Wakefield, Catullus, Christina Rossetti, and others) either in books or what ends up in my inbox as well as I'm taking a poetry workshop via Coursera, AND TEH handed me his copy of How To Read A Poem which he received as a gift from his mom when he expressed his own interest in poetry a few years back. TEH said it was super helpful and the number different poets were also useful. I consider all of this a master class.
The mania has more or less passed and I'm feeling mentally tired but overall OK. Earlier this week, when the come down started, I had moments of panic where the thought was all the work I've been doing in the last week and all the projects I came up with were all garbage. When your self-esteem is shakey, it's hard to feel good about something you're working on. That's one of the by-products of Borderline Personality Disorder: nothing you do will ever be good enough or accepted as good by anyone and you have not contributed anything of value into the world and you are basically a shell of a person. Even when people start following my wordpress.com blogs or like a post, I think they have questionable taste. I can't get over the feeling of rejection that my work is valuable. I should feel proud I put something out into the world, I created art, and I am worthwhile as a person but I can't even sustain it because as soon I feel remotely proud of what I've done, my asshole of a brain shits on it.
Every goddamned famous person who gives college commencement speeches says basically the same thing but Neil Gaiman said it best:
This is really, REALLY hard to remember because my first inclination, and I will suppose others feel it as well, is to compare yourself to more successful people and think, "Well, they just magicked themselves into being awesome and never had to work a day in their life." Rationally, I know this is not true but trying to talk yourself down from the edge when you're in a throes of a crisis is fucking hard shit. I try to remember the interview with Ray Bradbury where he talks about how wretched he was at the beginning of his career and he was self-aware of his wretchedness but he knew if he kept practicing, writing, and submitting, things would change. He gave the example how maybe he'd get published once every couple of months to once every month to once every week. It took years for this to happen. I am desperate to remind myself of this, no matter what I'm doing whether it's starting a new project, writing, or even knitting a scarf that the only way I can get better is if I keep practicing that thing. I'm tired of giving up so easily when the work gets hard.
Because I've been mentally exhausted this week, I've shifted all of the big projects to next week to give myself some breathing room. TEH has asked me to make a decision on what path I want to persue for a future career with the options that consist of the following
Get back into network engineering by starting with my CCENT
Get my PMP certification so I can become a project manager
Open up nerdgirl dot net
Get my MIS in digital media studies (this would give me the background to work in web content and social media as well as marketing and public relations in lieu of job experience)
I forget which but I'm pretty sure there is a 5
They all sound good. They are all good fits. Because face it, librarianship is over (LOL a job). TEH is of the mind the best option is for me to open up my own business (NerdGirl) as the problems with getting a library job, aka the case hanging over my head, will result in the same when I apply for jobs in other fields so being my own boss is ideal. He's also championing me to change my name which ugh, that's such fucking work and bullshit. (Interestingly, when I read articles by a writer I like, I find they literally have no online presence except for their bylines and maybe a Twitter account.) I don't know yet what I'm going to do but I'm giving myself until we go up to the cabin for summer and then using the summer for the homework I'll need to get going on that project. It's pretty clear I can only have one path because as we've seen in the past, having myself all over the place does shit all for me to get work done.
In addition to my writing and blog projects, I'm working hard on the mindfulness and having compassion for myself. Somewhere I mention I've been half-assing it for the last few years and if I want to get mentally better above being stable on the drugs, I need to be mindful of what I'm doing. Study after study after study has proven mindful work, DBT, meditation, etc, work in helping to defuse mental illness symptoms just like exercising can help elevate the mood. I'm working hard on reminding myself I need to do these things so I don't end up like my mother at the age of 75, sitting in a wheelchair and basically giving herself up to just existing and not participating in life. I've got decades and decades in front of me and I'd like to be whole in life and not paralyzed by fear.
Which, aside, I have the following taped above my laptop:
Future -> Anxiety
Past -> Depression
Present Moment -> Peace
You can be paralyzed or participating.
It's something we came up with in couple's therapy and when I'm feeling like shit is taking over my brain, I read this and I slowly take deep breaths and work on reminding myself that everything will be okay, I am not alone, and I can do this. Like everything else, this will take practice.
(My therapist is a yogi and works a lot with meditation and mindfulness in our sessions and she's got me reading The Healing Power of the Breath and our couple's therapist recommended Mindfulness for Bipolar Disorder which I'll be cracking into those along with my other mindfulness and DBT workbooks.)
Okay, I'm procrastinating. We've got friends coming in for the weekend and our place is a dump. TEH vacuumed up all the pug hair tumbleweeds the other day and we've left the rest of the deep cleaning to hell in a handbasket. I'm to clean and scrub the bathroom amongst other things so I should get on doing that.
I'm aiming to write a an update on the newsletter every other week so until then, shine on my crazy goblin friends.
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