I'm having a hard time writing today. I hadn't written since last week because the last few days have been pretty busy. Some of my friends in OA get up before dawn to do their writing and meditation. One of them, a teacher, actually complained this week that she had slept in to 7 am and so wasn't able to get her regular writing done. Well. As an inveterate night owl, I'm still struggling to come to at 8 am most mornings and am quite proud that I am now in bed before midnight most nights, so I'm not quite up with the dawn league yet. And when life demands that I show up before 9 am, the writing usually doesn't get done.
So, here I am, but it's like the hinge on my psyche has rusted shut and doesn't want to open. I think there's something in me that is screaming "I don't wanna, there's things in here that are gonna huuurrrrt!" I think that's my problem in a nutshell. Growing up I was told, keep it in, keep it in, don't show, don't share, it's not what ladies do, it's not what adults do, stop being so damn emotional, we don't want to see it. My mother would tell me I was too sensitive. So I learned how to keep it in, shut it down. What better to shut it down but with the food?
Writing the last two paragraphs has been like applying some oil to that hinge. Slowly the pandora's box of my brain opens a crack, and I catch a whiff of the sulfur of fear. I'm afraid. Tomorrow I go to a school where a friend is teaching to talk to her students about what it's like to be an artist. Wow, that brings up big issues, like: self confidence! I've got to spend some time today amassing some images from the web, like artists I really like and some drawing examples... And I have to go to the studio and get some materials to show them what I work with.
I think I also have to work my 12 step programme too, to deal with this fear, and my flippy ego. I have to take my ego out of this equation: I am going to this school not to talk about me, but about my experiences with art. Can you see the difference? These kids do not want to know about me, they want to know about what it's like being an artist. Taking my ego out of the equation defuses a lot of the fear. I'm a conduit, not the subject. I've got lots of really cool pictures I can use, and cool stuff I can show them. I think I'll pick up some vine charcoal today and a leather chamois that can be used for erasing. Maybe I can talk about creating the finished product starting from sketches. Sketchbooks! I'll take my sketchbooks, and some of my preparatory drawings for my final project. Now the juices are really starting to flow!!! Okay, now I'm feeling better. The whole thing starts to look do-able.
This stuff doesn't look like it should have anything to do with my eating. But it SO does, because so much of my eating is emotional! I had a dust up with the food, albeit a minor one, on Saturday. It was after another tiring pre-concert rehearsal with my choir. A lot of standing around while the technical issues of dealing with an unfamiliar performance venue got worked out. I had lunch with Fuzz and a couple of friends from the choir. At the end of the meal, something in my brain had decided it wasn't sated, that I have somehow been deprived. When Fuzz and I went to the health food store to pick up some steel cut oats for my world's best oatmeal, they had some of those baked "healthy" Guiltless Gourmet tortilla chips on the sample table. Something in my prehensile brain (stem?) decided these were fair game. So I went back not two, not three, but four times to the table to sample all four varieties. I went so many times I'm surprised I didn't get the hairy eyeball from the clerk when we finally got to the cash. I felt bewildered and ashamed when I got home. And amazingly, still hungry. I grabbed a handful of baby carrots from the fridge, thinking maybe my hunger was because the lunch was a little light on veggies. The hunger stayed.
Finally, I took a nap with Fuzz. He was tired from work and fighting a bit of a cold, and it had felt way too early when I dragged myself out of bed early that morning to hurtle off in a snow squall to the church for the rehearsal. It was a delicious nap! One of those ones that make you feel a little guilty, but very refreshed. Then I gathered my gym clothes up and went for a workout. And that felt really good. Somewhere during the nap, my attitude switch got reset. And then, the workout really flipped it into a good zone. The food was quiet the rest of the day, and then yesterday it was fine. I'm not so good at this self care stuff, my first reaction when feeling like I need some comfort is to eat. The good thing, is when I discover that I have other options in the self-nurturing department, it's a new discovery. New discoveries in middle age are a good thing.
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