Balance.

My life never seems to have any sort of balance to it. If one portion of my life is going well, the rest is usually in the shitter. Like now, for instance, I’m kicking major ass at work, so it’s hardly surprising that the personal and writing portions of my being are circling the drain. I’m eating like shit, I’m feeling like shit, I’m writing like shit.

I wish I could attend to one thing without everything else going nutso. Or, better yet, I wish I wasn’t so single-minded and could juggle things more effectively. Instead I just chuck the same ball up in the air, over and over, while all the others roll around on the floor.

Sure, I have a lot on my plate: marriage, grown-up responsibilities, a full-time job, a full-time degree program, a novel-in-progress that’s making me plumb the depths of my grief every day. But everyone’s plate is full. I don’t know how to get better at this, but I hope I figure it out soon.

On the bright side, my final packet will be in the mail very, very shortly. As in, tomorrow morning at the latest. And my mentor will have it all electronically tonight. I can’t wait to wash my hands of this semester. It’s been difficult, even painful at times. I was pushed to new limits, and I learned a lot about myself as a write and a person. But not having to touch my own writing unless I want to until after the New Year is a glorious feeling.

Okay, off to try to learn how to juggle.

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Good news all around.

If you couldn’t tell from my last post, yesterday was rough. I still feel somewhat trapped and stifled today–it’s an ongoing condition–but some encouragement came last night and this morning that reminded me why I’m here.

My faculty mentor sent me feedback on my third packet by e-mail last night. I had known when I sent the stuff that it hadn’t been my best work; a lot of it was a very rough first draft that I didn’t have time to re-work or infuse with the real nature of the characters. There were, however, sections that were difficult for me to write, given the sheer emotion behind the scenes, and she apparently thinks I did a good job at capturing this:

“Once again, you’ve proven that you have an uncanny ability to utilize concrete details to evoke complex feelings. My eyes were brimming with tears reading this whole last scene. “

Sure, there were sections that she believed needed work, and I agree. But knowing that I do have the ability to reach someone–not just someone: a published author–with my words was enough to make my night. She also liked my essay on Anna Karenina…though it wasn’t the kind of essay she was looking for. Whoops!

This morning, I opened my GMail to find a message from the woman who supervises the writing class I run at my town’s library. Yesterday, I’d asked her if the library was hiring, in my perpetual efforts to put my name out there. They aren’t, but she did say:

“I will happily write you a terrific letter of recommendation:  I’m very impressed with your classes, your organization and how well you work with the group!”

So, that was nice to hear. Both of these instances reminded me that there is a pretty big reason I have to stay in this job: I do have talent, in writing and teaching, and I have to pay my dues before I can do what I love. So, for now, paying to write and teaching for free is how it has to be. And maybe that’ll bother me tomorrow, or next week, or next month. But right now, I’m grateful for this job and what it’s given me the chance to do.

Stuck.

Just writing that makes me feel claustrophobic.

It’s time, once again, to complain about my job. Slowly but surely, everything I used to like about my job is being taken away. There’s been a rearrangement of job titles/offices/duties, and I’m getting the shit end of it. Last year, when we decided we’d split my position in two, my boss said I should work for her, since she would be in charge of all communications and marketing, and that’s what I enjoyed doing. She even sent me on a six-day PR/Marketing training to prepare myself. I came back bubbling with ideas for expanding our social media presence and improving our communications. Since then, slowly but surely, everything I’ve liked about my job has been taken from me and given to another assistant. I am no longer in charge of social media or the website copy, or anything else that I was promised. I was even denied the opportunity to teach a Journalism course after school, after my work day.

I continue to offer myself for all sorts of writing and marketing opportunities, only to be told that, after four years working here, my boss doesn’t “trust” me with larger-scale marketing and communication endeavors. Any time I try to make creative suggestions that will improve a letter she’s written or make it more readable to the public, she gets upset and says she has her own voice. I’ve been relegated to base-line proofreading. This would all seem less offensive and disheartening were I not halfway through my MFA in writing. I have been cut off from all attempts at and outlets for creativity, and my brain feels like it’s drying up.

Every day, I search a handful of my favorite job search engines and send out my resume. For most writing jobs, I’m considered under-qualified. Even when I have my MFA, I can’t really teach without experience. I need this job’s paycheck and vacation time to finish school. There’s nowhere to go and nothing to do. In every sense of the word, I’m stuck in a job that has stifled me, and I officially have no investment in anything I do here.

This post was depressing, but I just don’t have the optimism in me today.

Fact to fiction

I tell you, I’ve learned more about myself in the past two semesters of writing than I have from mulitple stints in therapy.  For instance: when things get hard, I get paralyzed.

I finally put my second-to-last packet in the mail recently, after much procrastination. In the end, I came up with 20 pages of original work instead of the required 25: a gap I will have to reconcile in this month’s work. I’m less worried about the extra five pages in this packet than I am about the reason getting 20 pages was like pulling teeth.

Writing comes easily to me when what I’m writing is completely–or mostly–fictional. That’s why my last packet felt so easy and was so successful. There’s a freedom in totally making things up that lets me really spread out on the page. It’s when the work hits close to home that I have a problem.

This packet focused mainly on the main character’s relationship with her family: specifically, her brother and sister. These characters are modeled heavily after my own brother and sister, and something about this makes it terribly difficult to make them three-dimensional characters. Do you ever try and explain the meaning of a word, but keep using that word in your definition? That’s what it feels like.

But the difficulties did not only lie in trying to bring certain characters to life. I focused most of the pages around the death of the main character’s father and the aftermath within her family; ripped from the headlines of my life, as it were. Four years later and in the context of fiction, my father’s death is still not easy to write about. When I finally bit the bullet and tried, I got down a few lines, cried; got down a few more, cried again. You get the idea. I know this meant I was on to something real, but it was also really scary and paralyzed me for a while afterwards.

My first instinct is to step back from the super-realness of this packet and do some fleshing-out of some more fictiony areas. But some unfamiliar voice inside is telling me to push on that painful place between fact and fiction and see where it goes.

Dear words:

Please come out of me, like now.