My Type 4 Inner Demon Is the Mood Minder

I’m in a weird place right now. I’m feeling rather foolish, actually.

Yesterday, I was really okay health-wise and I found myself bouncing off the walls. So I cleaned, worked on yard work a little, then bounced around from one distraction to the next until almost 2 am.

In the back of my mind was this question: When am I going to work on my novel? But it stayed in the back of my mind as I avoided facing what was really going on. I was a total slave to my mental state. My mood was dictating my actions. Its a 4 curse, to put your mood before anything else, and yesterday I gave in to it.

Maybe I was feeling vulnerable from the support group meeting (I did talk about my baggage too, after all.) Maybe I’m getting cabin fever. I don’t know. The point is I blew my day on pointless distractions in some fruitless attempt to feel better emotionally. And of course it didn’t work.

Today I woke up to a pain flare. I hurt all over and felt like crap. I managed to get what I needed done very slowly, but by 3 pm I just felt tired of running away from myself. So, despite my flare, I opened my story file up and stared at it for a couple minutes– and then it happened: it just started to write itself again. Its almost like I channel my fiction. I wasn’t stuck on the next scene because my imagination took over and all I had to do was dictate in writing what I saw. I completed the chapter I started 2 days ago and then did a scan edit like I can’t help but do– and all was good again.

I know I promised I wouldn’t write about NaNoWriMo again until the end of the month, but I have to bring it up to discuss my personal mini-revelation thing here! The issue isn’t “blank paper (or screen) syndrome.” I don’t think I ever get that. I just have to fucking sit still in one place and GO. And it just happens. When it happens so easily I find some shame issues rising up like– what could possibly be my fucking excuse for putting off this process the last 20 years of my adult life!? Those damned Voices of Judgement in my head don’t stop me from actually writing– they just keep me hopping around like a cricket on a griddle in a hazy cloud of anxiety and avoidance. Its not that writing is hard for me. It was never that hard for me.

I’m not saying anything I happen to write would necessarily be something anyone would want to read– but my problem is not creation, its not lack of know-how, and its not writer’s block. Process has never been the real issue– but only in my refusing to surrender to process. Its almost like the ease of creation itself scares me. Where the hell does that come from, huh? Is it that I don’t believe anything that just comes like that can be trusted? Why would that be? I write in blogs almost daily as a compulsion more than a discipline. Writing has been a part of who I am since the age of 8.

Is it fear of failure– or fear of success– that tweaks out my inner demons? I don’t know. All I know is that I am damned sick of the ghosts of my past having any power over me anymore. This is the last huge hurdle for me to overcome in my estimation. Suppressing my deepest fantasies from being expressed through my greatest talent and passion: writing. I climb this wall and maybe the rest of my adult life can be lived as an adult– not as a scared child in adult garments, intimidated by the world and nearly everyone in it. I’m too old to be living a lie shoved onto me from parents who were emotional cripples.

I think back on THIS dream and what it meant: http://lucretiasheart.livejournal.com/486750.html

Paul Atreides in Dune said that “fear is the mind killer.” Its more than that, though, isn’t it? My mind works great– at everything including making me afraid when I’m in that zone. Fear is the soul sucker. Its the hope crusher. Its inspiration termination.

But mostly–? Fear is a serious fucking waste of time.