Opalescence

Setbacks and 182,500 March 12, 2011

I had a bit of a setback to 182,500 recently.

Lately, I’ve spent probably nearly two weeks worth of time being unable to write.

A range of personal issues have been weighing heavily on my mind, all at once. I won’t go into much detail, but I will say that, even individually, each issue was significant enough that it might have thrown off my momentum for at least a day or two. As it turns out, several sprang up simultaneously, resulting in a mental version of someone physically curling up into the fetal position and going silent and limp.

Shortly after they emerged, I would go to the keyboard to write… and find myself killing time and productivity by playing Entanglement or World of Warcraft. Writing was just not possible; I seemed to have a combination of writer’s block and a semi-nauseous reaction to the idea of writing. This, along with several other signs, was clearly brought on by my worrying about these issues. I wasn’t eating regularly, having difficulty sleeping, and just felt more stressed in general.

I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten through it, and it wasn’t one huge two-week block of time, to be sure. I had the occasional sporadic burst of creative energy that enabled me to hammer out the occasional page on a project. But, looking back, I’ve got a lot of days to make up, even if my word count average is about where it should be.

This is probably my biggest weakness as a writer, and possibly as a human being. I can accomplish so much whenever conditions are ideal, or even just good or average. But if you throw one good-sized monkeywrench—or even several tiny ones—into the works of my little world, it becomes really easy for me to get worried, distracted, unfocused, and at times, just plain useless. It’s probably worse than being an actual perfectionist—they only demand flawlessness in the things they do; for me, I have to have conditions “perfect” in order to function well, or even normally.

I suppose becoming worried is my way of dealing with it. I take time and energy off from other tasks (with the exception of work) so that I can think about and deal with larger problems, confront my fears and uncertainties about them, and when those fears and uncertainties are resolved, move on. At that point, I feel like I’m mentally prepared to deal with them if they become larger.

I feel like I’ve done this, and am ready to play catch-up and continue with this resolution. The problems themselves are still there, and yet I’m already back to writing, as you can tell with this entry. Am I still worried about them? Yes, I am. Will they be resolved anytime soon? I doubt it.

But I think John Lennon put it best when he once sang that “life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” It’s not easy to take that phrase to heart, however true it may be. We have a tendency to want things in our lives to turn out a particular way, and don’t usually take unexpected or large changes very well. But that is how life works, and whether we know it or not, that’s how we work more often than not.

I think if we can learn to let go of the way we demand to see things at all times, at least occasionally, then life becomes a lot easier to handle in the long run. Hopefully this most recent setback will serve as a lesson to me, and enable me to overcome any future ones with a bit more aplomb.