November Nattering (Day 1)

My friend introduced me to a new challenge today — writing 1,111 words every day in November. I can’t imagine I will be super consistent with this but it is worth a shot and I have been interested in creating better habits, especially in terms of hobbies. My brain is happy that this started on a Monday. For some reason, that feels… strangely comforting and satisfyingly organized. Writing has always been something I have loved and fell back on yet I haven’t written consistently in so long.. feels strange to begin now after all of this time, however, there is no time like the present. Right?

(CW assault in next paragraph)

It is strange to remember the last time I submersed myself in written word.. I have grown a lot since then — I lived in Portland (circa 2013) and went to the slam poetry readings every Sunday, religiously. Working a lot, it had been my only respite every week, while battling college classes and juggling three jobs. Sometimes, I think about it and laugh about how stupid I was but I had this idea in my head that I needed to pay off my student loans while still in school. Hence the three jobs in between majoring in Theater, of all degrees. I don’t think I slept much, if not rarely. Feels foolish now because it might have worked and maybe I wouldn’t have money hanging over my head so much, but I ended up moving to Chicago after my grandpa passed away in October of that year. It felt necessary to move there. Nothing was holding me back and Portland felt like a scab that wouldn’t heal. Prior to the news of my grandpa, someone I looked up to assaulted me and they were prevelent in the same spoken word community and someone I had thought to be a trustworthy person. We weren’t friends, rather acquaintances, but we ended up in the same place frequently.

I’ve resulted to the fact that shit happens and shit loves to happen to me.. Everyone protested when I told them, but it took me a long time to speak the reality into existence. Maybe three years later, still, I told very few people and sometimes I still gaslight myself into believing I was in the wrong for saying anything to begin with. However, that’s not the case and I am reminded it is important to be honest about these things but it still breaks my heart some days of how heavy a memory can be.

Trust has always been an issue for me. I’ve been researching a lot about manifestation and energy, releasing expectation, trusting the universe. I can’t fathom how harsh reality happens so consistently but I know it is a generational trauma loop I am stuck in. Bad things happen, sure, but often I get stuck in this pit of dispair that bad things are just a few days away — as though, if too much time passes without some sort of trauma or event occuring where I feel slapped in the face by the universe.. I wonder when the next occurance will be. It really sucks and it feels terrible to be stuck in this process of anticipating bad things to happen to me.

I used to think I was really good at boundaries and I think, at one point or another, I really was.. but it has been a long time since my life felt like my life and not a cog in some machine of life. “This ends with me” saying in breaking generational trauma has always made me chuckle.. the simulation grants ambiguous signs, which I am constantly looking out for. Although, I fear I am far more disconnected in result of my grief. Funny how that works.

I have no idea where to begin at all and this feels super jumbled in my head trying to do this. I know I can’t pick up where I left off, that’s not how it works, but I feel a strong urge to write some memoir-esque sense of what I think my life has been like, leading up to this moment. Honestly, it’s been fucking hard and somewhere I think this might make it easier, or somehow cerimonious, in a sense where this practice of writing may help me figure out how to better be myself.

A lot of me, a lot of the time, feels so quiet. Where do you even start when you haven’t stopped to write it all down in…

Over a decade.. literally

I used to let every part of my process onto paper, keyboard, voice memo sessions while riding my bike, you name it. Hell, I used to ride my bike! Sometimes I wonder if I have any hobbies at all that feel tangeable. Gosh — I don’t even know what a hobby is.. I love life. I don’t need much. I don’t think struggling is inherently bad, per-se, just uncomfortable and somewhat necessary but I have also been on fast mode for what seems like eons of time. Grief overcomes me. Slowing down is the hardest thing for me to do, however, I live in a small town now and somehow I think that meant I would have more space to figure all of this out. I guess, in a way, I am by doing this. Hopefully, something inside of me can keep it up. Writing again excites me and I want to feel excited and driven — I really do!

I don’t know what this will entail. I don’t know if it will make any sense. I don’t know if I will sit with this for a few days and drop it but something visceral inside feels compelled to express everything rumbling inside me. This is the only way I know how.

My brain is a tangent in and of itself. This is a part of that, I guess. This is healing, I hope, redesigning my brain and guiding my body into a new era of my life.

Writing fiction has never come very easily to me. Writing in mixed messages felt weird under my tongue. I want to be honest — this has always been how I’ve communicated. Reality is an obsession for me, I think, constantly processing and twirling memories, ideas, moments in my head. This is a way for me to set it all down and find relief, meaning.

I would enjoy doing more tactile things like knitting, crocheting, painting, maybe even cross-stitch but I have never done any of those things. Besides painting, I have tried painting and it is something I have wondered if I would be good at but it is expensive and time consuming. I suppose so is writing, but you don’t need much and it is essentially free, besides the energy used on electricity. I don’t enjoy writing freehand so much — my brain moves faster than my hands can write.

Another friend of mine, she has suggested that I start doing morning pages and I wonder if this is the best way to go. I have wanted to hone in on my own spiritual practices and this seems like a great way to do shadow/light work and process some things that seem to clog up a lot of my space, emotionally. However, getting up in the morning to open the lodge is hard enough… Maybe this is a good way of creating a consistent practice. Winter is coming and the world is slowing down, sounds like a perfect time to create habits that make the world feel a little easier to grasp. Something that does make me excited to get up.

Here is a part of the email newsletter I recieved today from Marlee Grace, the person who is starting this 1,111 words a day challenge this November (NaNo WriMo)…

“Integrating the research, taking the time to retreat and let it move through you (think Sally in the garden), and showing up to the work of bearing witness to yourself is spell casting. It is a way of breaking through ancestral trauma, breaking the spells of those who came before you. And being of maximum service to those who don’t yet have the words to enter the creek they want to cross.

Art making as recording, words as recording, movement as recording. Keeping close to my practices of recording keeps me just above the surface of drowning. Keeps me in even the most exhausted tread of water. Because I know it’s never for nothing. It’s always for the people. It’s always to bring the people into the circle of protection. We may record alone but we absolutely do not do this work alone. The work of complete transformation, collective shapeshifting, bringing to light what has been in the dark.”

I like that.

Writing feels heavily tied to memories that physically feel like diving into a dumpster full of literal shit. Trauma processing, for me, has been a seven-year-long writers block on override. And as one would describe method, I want to break that ceiling.

Not a lot of folks in my life hear my stories. I’ve been to therapy, I’ve processed with others — I understand the nuances of healing, but it has always been extremely difficult for me to set things down. Everything reminds me of something else. I ramble, I digress, and often times make absolutely no sense to anyone. It is all extremely confusing sometimes. To know too much, yet not have enough energy or power to explain it or comprehend it.

I have to preface though, I am not a writer — I mean.. I don’t think any of the rules matters anyway since I am never going to be the person who shames myself into eloquence nor am I the person who will write a whole novel or perhaps I am second guessing my own capabilities. Who knows! I am open to it.

Alas, my brain does what it does and I love that for me. You either come with me in the journey of finding a rhythm or you don’t; It doesn’t make a difference to me. This is for me and it is deeply personal. As it should be.

Sometimes I think — well, maybe it should make a difference. How I could hold folks closer to me and allow them to love me, know me, but that is so exhausting. Social interactions take a lot out of me. I have always been more drawn to texting, emailing, interacting in doses. Sometimes, rarely, there are people who make me feel safe and comfortable enough to extend my extroverted side, go deeper in connecting. However, I extend a lot of energy extremely quickly and get lost in that burnout. It feels especially rare.

I’ve been working my whole life.. My parents are workaholics. I am recovering as a workaholic as well as an autistic adult in clinical burnout. I often tell people I’ve worked in a grocery store my whole life — “oh, yeah, I was raised in one!” I would stammer proudly,

“my grandma would be in the back and I would be sitting at the register with a bell for when anyone came up with alcohol or needed cigarettes and lottery tickets.” Well, it’s true.. and somewhere I convinced myself that was a purpose for me, everything else by the wayside. It didn’t matter than I could roll nineteen baguettes in a minute of had perfected recipe after recipe with precision. No one cared about a baker in a grocery store. I just did the damn thing and paid my bills.

Anyway, I walked away from grocery stores (for now, and hopefully always) to live in a small town in the Sierra Nevada region (Lost Sierra, if you will). Gold Country, California, to run a lodge and inn with my partner. It’s going really well so far. The only thing missing is, well, this semblence of personal routine and joy. This is my way of doing that. So, thanks, friend and random internet influencer, for sharing the idea of 1,111 words. I am far beyond that count today and hopeful this will stick for me.

I’m excited to see where this goes… until tomorrow.