Overwhelmed, or Just Lucky?

I thought about blogging today about how the upheaval in my personal life has once again been detrimental to my creative life. I’ve mentioned it here before, how hard it is for me to write in transition. For me, transition is the enemy of The Writing Life, whereas routine seems to be its best companion. As I write that now, I realize how ironic that is, because it is in the transitions that life truly happens; if it weren’t for transitions, what would we have to write about? Everyone knows that the hallmark of good fiction is character development, and a character that ultimately changes by story’s end. Memoir, too. So I’m going to keep living, and changing, and writing about it all in my journal — and maybe when the dust settles, I’ll be able to utilize it in fiction, too.

 

These days, my life feels like an endless to-do list, and I’m at the point where something has to go. Because it’s so hard for me to write in transition, I’ve decided to go easy on myself in this regard. But as I was feeling overwhelmed at the grocery store today, wondering how I would ever get it all done, I remembered a podcast I listened to by Gregg Braden last week. I’d never heard of him before, and I still don’t know much about him, including how credible he is or isn’t. But his work has to do with research to link whether our thoughts or, more specifically, our belief systems and deep-soul feelings, have the power to affect our reality. He claims that our thoughts are weak, but that when we deeply believe something, it has the power to impact our circumstances. And so, with this in mind, I try not to let myself get stuck in a feeling that I “can’t do it all” or that there’s “just too much.” I’m trying to consciously change my script to this:

 

 

And when I remembered that this is what I want to learn to feel deeply, I immediately saw my dilemma from a whole new angle. Right now, I’m swamped with freelance work and wondering whether I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. I’m trying to decide whether I’ll need to let someone down or whether I just need to pull through this stretch, not drop any balls because I may need this work in the future. And that’s when I realized how incredibly lucky I am to have this problem. When I first started freelancing three years ago, I was petrified with the fear that I’d be without work and without a means to support myself. Money is incredibly tight right now … so what better time to be inundated with work? I can do this, one deep breath and changed script at a time.