MY PAGES - “What am I DOING?!?”

Sometimes the DOING is in the TRYING. I’m for sure trying.

Want to know what I’m doing? One of these pages has key dates for August happenings. It took a long time (like, five hours) because writing everything by hand takes much longer than it might seem, but at least it’s relatively easy to share (emotionally speaking) since it’s just a calendar of sorts.

But I’ve also been working on other pages.

I’m including those here, too, because my task this year and right now is to push through my own resistance (which is hefty) and just try. Try making things, try doing things I really want to do, try sharing them, even when literally nothing is perfect. Even when I have all these tangled threads constricting my brain and my process that may not make sense to anyone else (or even me, at times, for that matter). I am too full, too crowded, too much. None of this is new. It’s what I’ve been doing for a very long time and how it’s felt for years, but I’m really trying (always, really trying).

It simply boils down to a matter of directing the robustness of my will with greater discipline. This is very much not-easy for me. I guess that’s why I know I have to accept it and go with it. After so many years of this, (I think) I should have learned by now that I have no other choice. I just have to try.

A couple months ago, someone in the Liberation is Local group reminded us, “There is no try, just do.” We laughed at the echoes of Yoda in our very causal, thoughtful, and lovingly supportive space. Today, for me, that phrase feels encouraging, yes, but it lingers with the energy of a gentle haunting. It’s been floating around my head as I’ve been trying to get more comfortable with the fact that, well, perhaps doing may coincide with trying, too. Or, at least, trying is doing something, even when we know we’re not doing the exact thing (we thought) we set out to do.

So, with respect to the other pages…

Especially over the past week, I’ve been practicing writing in ways that move me closer to creating “my pages,” the ones I always talk about and have been envisioning for at least half a decade but haven’t quite been able to materialize.

It’s hard.

The process is hard on my body. Just the past few days of disciplined trying-to-do-page-making has irritated a chronic injury in my dominant shoulder from when I fell down the stairs a couple years ago. Sitting for 5+ hours at a time, I’m now joined by a new voice in my head that screams obvious ways to correct my form like a flabbergasted coach, “Write from your wrist! Not your shoulder!”

And then there’s the Seemingly Endless Dance of Doom that, for years, has left countless orphaned pages scattered about in disorganized file folders somewhere in The Cloud, or buried next to admissions of my most personal secrets in my bound journals, or drafted on loose papers carelessly stacked in corners of wherever in my house I last sat down to try…again.

When I committed to making “my pages,” this triggered a tendency for me to waffled back and forth between programs and mediums that sidetrack me like I’m sniffing out The Elusive Key that would finally enable me to create the damn things. I’ve cycled through digital notes, dead-tree paper, so many permanent markers, fine-tip waterproof pens, pens that bleed, and back to fancier design programs.

(Deeper side note: I’m also wondering if this is just an elaborate expression of deeper issues around vulnerability and my own emotional security—meets undiagnosed ADHD—meets an unforgivably dark world that makes so many things feel too heavy to do dumb little pages about my spiraling thought processes when I know I really want to share what’s begging to be born before I die, too—(and therefore) meets a significant dosage of self-criticism and disappointment that my therapist is trying to help me wrap in a warm blanket of self-compassion. Yeah, we talk about all of these this. Very regularly. It’s the primary reason I got back into therapy.)

But one thing I do know, which is confirmed by the present ache in my right shoulder, is that when I do sit down, I can get into a flow of making pages. I can even get into the flow of typing a post (wow, look at this word count!). In either mode of writing, with a digital pen in hand and my rusty shoulder or a keyboard and my carpal-tunnely wrists, when I do get into the flow, I am often surprised by what emerges on the page. Sometimes that surprise ends up feeling a little weird because it’s not what I thought I would write. But I guess that I have to be okay with that, for now. Because at least I’m trying!

I know. “Isn’t that the creative process?” Yes. It is.

“Isn’t that also the unruly process of becoming?” Yeah. Probably.

Anyway, here are three pages from this week.