So, you may have noticed that there was no post last week. I let my anxiety get the better of me and I had an entirely unproductive week outside of my day job. My house didn’t get clean, I wrote maybe 1k words, I focused all my energy on getting the necessary stuff done and everything else suffered. It’s not that I don’t think of writing as a priority. It is. But when everything is on fire and I need to let some of it burn, writing gets scorched.

I’m back at it tonight. Life isn’t any more balanced or less stressful. I’m accepting that for this season, it’s going to be rough. The baseline has reset. It won’t be like this forever, but it is for now. I can live with that. This is how it usually goes, I enter an anxiety spiral, suffer through it, and then my brain recovers enough that I start to make plans, form strategies, look at things rationally and pragmatically. Once the shift is made, I can function again.  Then we rinse and repeat until this period is over.

It kinda stinks that this is happening in Spring. I adore this season. As a gardener, nothing beats the energy and joy of the garden coming to life again. My house is filled with seedlings in every sunny window. It’s a lot of work, but so worth it. There is a special kind of happiness produced by watching the seeds you planted turn into tiny green things shoving their way through the dirt and reaching for the sun. It’s not unlike the moments when the random scenes you’ve been working on for weeks and months start to coalesce into a legit first draft.

Today I was potting up seedlings and got a great idea to solve a problem in the 2^nd act of the book. I still had dirt under my fingernails when I sat down to type it out. I reread it just now and it’s not bad. I think it’s going to work. It’s such a blessing to get these moments of pure creativity in the middle of a ride on the struggle bus. Brains are funny things.