i am starting to feel an off-the-charts level of guilt about not writing. this blog is all that gets written these days. while that's good, i cannot remember the last time i sat down to bang out a page or two on my latest story. i continue to do the things i rely on for inspiration: read stephen king novels, watch woody allen movies, listen to the who, but i cannot get to the place that allows me to produce anything. my attention span shrinks daily and my motivation is along for the ride. it's not writer's block, per se; i know what comes next...i just can't get it out.
i don't feel well today (starting to think this may be mono.) just what i need, right? cold, rainy and miserable outside and i cannot get warm no matter what i do. my mood always corresponds closely to the weather and it is foul today! the sun should be out tomorrow.
tomorrow...one of two dominant reasons for my anxiety today. i start EMDR therapy tomorrow for my PTSD. i'm scared. EMDR stands for "eye movement desensitization reprocessing." from what i gather it uses eye movement to connect the right and left hemispheres of the brain to allow the patient (in this case, ME!) to attach feelings and emotions, heretofore unexperienced, to the events surrounding the trauma, in my case, the flood. PTSD is the brains way of protecting the trauma victim from the event but it leaves the person stuck in the "fight or flight" pattern and does not allow them to experience, process and mourn the event and its many consequences.
i think the long and the short of it is that i have intellectualized the losses, the events and the memories to the extent that, while i acknowledge their severity, i have avoided what it all "felt" like. without feeling it all i will continue to be an outsider to my own experience and remain numb. that's not really working for me. it keeps me anxious and exhausted.
the second reason for my anxiety today is less clinical and more comical: i am terrified of losing my teeth. this thought has lingered for months and has reemerged as the #1 ridiculous fear brought on by the book i am reading. i admit that there are many ways in which i would benifit if i listened more closely to my best friend. she always has my back. she told me years ago not to read stephen king's "the tommyknockers." her reasons don't matter and my failure to listen doesn't really matter. what matters is that i had listened i wouldn't be 500 pages into a 750 page novel in which nearly everyone has lost their teeth. dozens upon dozens of passages concerning teeth and the losing thereof. i won't stop reading for several reasons: i'm 2/3 of the way through, it's one of the few king novels i haven't read, i hold out hope it will eventually inspire the above-mentioned need to write. BUT people keep losing their teeth and it's freaking me out!!
y'all know that this obsession with my teeth grew worse when my pug, winston, lost a tooth a while back...and now this novel! i just can't imagine that i will get through all this without some freak tooth-related incident.
grace and peace
First of all, I think your teeth are probably ok. Secondly, thanks for the congrats on the other post. Thirdly and most importantly, when I was reading this in the google reader it cracked me up because the ad at the bottom was for p90X.
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