Friday, April 8, 2016

#5 Getting up after life knocks on your ass.

A few hours after my last post on March 28th I was driving on the freeway when there was a sudden hard jolt and the minivan spun out through two lanes of ~60mph traffic.

Turns out a speeding driver had decided to look away from the road and consequently rear-ended us.

My life has been absolute chaos since.

And as the pieces have barely begun to settle, I slowly regained the luxury of thinking back to this writing dream that I once had and how sad it was that it had been wiped out so quickly.

I cannot drive due to injury. I have no laptop. My boyfriend is on the verge of losing his job from his injuries and lawyer stuff is happening amidst a whirlwind of medical appointments without a vehicle.

Yep, it was nice while it lasted. *wistful sigh*
Do I still want it?
The thought came unbidden. I was annoyed. Of course I still want it.

But look at me. I'm a wreck. I've had four major anxiety attacks in as many days, one of them by far the worst I've ever experienced. What is it that I think I can do in this state? How can I possibly write?"
Do. I. Still. Want. It?
Duh.

So...I got back to work.

I went easy on myself. I'm going to be my own boss for a good long while so it's best I learn how to be the kindly sort who still gets things done. It's my first day on the job after a major accident so taking it slow and gentle is to be expected.

To begin, I glanced over my blog and checked my email, just to get a feel for the layout again. Then I took a break to relax, exercise, and snack. Keeping myself moving tends to help me process things without getting overwhelmed. And in the process of returning to the computer to read a bit and then stepping away to digest it, I could literally feel my perspective shifting as ideas began flooding in.

For today, I decided to tackle building my portfolio from things I've already written. I'd hunt down which writings I want to eventually transfer to my platform for increased publicity and start polishing them up.

I created the folders on my thumb drive, copied over and edited through them. In total I now have three pieces pretty much ready, each one vastly different portraying the large swath of subjects and styles of writing I've done.

And that's only the beginning.

This isn't going to be pretty. The recovery is going to be slow and painful and messy and downright stupid at times. But I'm working on letting go of my perfectionist, overachiever tendencies and learning instead to just get it done.

I know writing this on an empty blog is like shouting into a tunnel to hear your own echo, but for some reason there's still validity in it. I'm doing this. A serious car accident is not going to stop me. And if I can come back from this, I can come back from darn near anything.

...right?

I...guess we'll find out.

Either way, I'm giving it my best shot.

2 comments:

  1. Take your time. Be gentle with yourself. I suspect that as you slowly return to health and a more steady internal state, you'll have much to write about related to this shock, stress, and setback, but this is not a time to set big reach goals. Your decision to keep publishing things here seems like a reasonable goal and a good experiment. If you need to slow down anything, you can.

    I hope this slowly brings you peace following that chaos.

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    Replies
    1. Thank you so much for the suggestions and well wishes!!

      That's exactly what I'm thinking, that I can go at my own pace through this recovery. :)

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