On a more global scale, but also on a more personal scale. My husband got fired from his job. As of December 1, he hasn’t found a new one. We’re in real danger of losing our home. That’s scary.
And a dear friend of mine passed away. That would be hard enough on its own, but I was her primary caregiver while she was ill, and her husband isn’t doing well. His children live out of state, so they hired me to stay on as HIS primary caregiver. The difference is that my friend was aware and mostly capable while she was ill. She had me over to do things she couldn’t do. Her husband is developing dementia and can’t take care of himself at all. Things that he can do, like bathing regularly, he simply forgets to do. This job suddenly got a lot harder. And meantime, I’m dealing with my own grief, going over to my friend’s home and sorting through her old things, looking at new clothes she never got to wear, pictures of her and her friends and pets from high school, college, vacations.
On top of that, I’m attempting to hold down a writing schedule.
As you can imagine, this hasn’t been terribly successful.
I don’t exactly have writer’s block. It’s not physically painful to try to write. What I get is really worried and distracted when I sit down and try to get words on a page. I’m getting words down, but not quickly, and not on the schedule I tried to set up for myself.
I was having a lot of guilt over not writing. I still am. I was sitting in my friend’s hospital room, listening to her hospice nurse tell her that they could not send her home, watching her slip into a morphine-induced sleep, thinking I should be writing. That I should not be by her side, or if I should, I should have my laptop with me at the hospital and be working on the next book. I hadn’t been putting in much time on it since I’d been helping my friend out at her house and working on building up clients for my other micro businesses (which are going okay, thank you). But my writing was suffering.
It was after the second time she woke up and asked for me and told me she was glad I was with her that I realized: It was okay for me to be off my writing schedule. It was okay for me to be at the hospital watching my dying friend sleep and not be writing. It’s still okay for me to be off my schedule while I grieve, and while I work on helping her husband’s sons get him into proper custody and placed in a home that can care for him. My next novel won’t be done on the timeline I had set for myself. Probably the book after that won’t be written in a timely fashion either. It’ll take me a bit to get back on my schedule. If I were working at a job, they would ask me if I was all right and needed time off for a while yet. They wouldn’t expect my productivity to be normal for a bit. And that would be okay. So I need to not be so hard on myself about the same thing.
Man, is that tough.
Even writing this and admitting to myself that I’ll be off my game for a bit yet is hard. I feel like that’s not okay. I am a writer, I need to write books, as many as I can as fast as I can. My schedule has been blown to shit. I wanted to have 140,000 words by the end of October, and here it is the end of November and I’ve only got 70,000. And I’m not writing daily. Shit, I can’t even sit down and plot, and I am angry about it. I am mad at myself. I am not going to get another book by writing a few words here and a few words there.
But I found my friend’s high school senior picture yesterday, and I broke down crying.
So what am I supposed to do?
I need to forgive myself, and give myself permission to be a bad writer for a while. I hate it, but that’s what I need.
Ugh. That’s about all I can write on this topic. I’m grieving and going to suck for a while. That’s not okay. But it has to be. Somehow.
I miss my friend.
