The Basement Office

I died for a while.  Not physically, but a very stressful situation just shut me down completely.

I’m better now, I think, and I’m writing.

The increasingly frustrating and rage-inducing situation finally made me snap.  My wife and I had “The talk” and the verdict was clear, I had to do something and do it now.  I found out that my company’s employee counseling isn’t worth a damn.

Luckily, I am a very very lucky man.

I’m going to be fine.   It took a whole month, but recovery has begun.

I couldn’t write, I was so full of stress and rage.  I mean Hulk level rage.   I snapped from the weight of it.  It wasn’t just that I couldn’t deal, I couldn’t write, I couldn’t do anything else but be angry, eat (too much) and sleep.

I WOULDN’T write.  I didn’t want to.  Not wanting to write led to a crisis of identity.  Did I really want to write?  Was just not cut out to tell the stories I thought I wanted to tell?  Should I forget about it?

In many ways, this made things worse.  I was stupidly focusing on this rather than the situation that created the mess in the first place.

It took a long while, but I’ve snapped out of it.  Recovery is ongoing but it’s going well, I am writing.
Lesson learned:

I am a writer.  I write.

When the previous two sentences are true, all is (almost) right in my world.   When those premises are false, the problem is NOT writing, the problem is bigger than that and I need to deal with it immediately.

If I don’t have the desire to write, something is wrong.

I won’t get fooled again.

I feel better when I write, even when I just WANT to write and for some reason I can.
I thank my ever loving and ever patient wife for being the one who deals with me on a day to day basis, who does the grunt work of keeping the importance of my writing front and center in a hundred different ways, who sighs and tells me everything will be alright as long as I persevere.  I thank her a lot on this blog, and I can only say that I could thank her every day in every post and it would not be enough.  I am a very lucky man.

I also thank my very good friends.  You know who you are.  You care, you talk and you encourage.  I am grateful beyond words for this.  In my group of friends I will single out my fellow writers in the writing group because you both especially know what it’s like and having the support of two people that I very much admire is uplifting.
It’s been almost two weeks now and I’ve written every day.   Stay tuned for more activity on this blog.

Rule number one is once again very much in effect.
No more zero days.