I strung up a line this morning and hung my washing out in my rose-scented garden. Lately I’ve been keeping my window open, loving the feel of the breeze coming through the chipped old white pane. Last night I even slept with it open, and the cool night air was delicious.
It’s time for me to make my life a bit more wholesome. (Mom, stop reading.) It’s been rather unwholesome of late, mostly in reaction to things going badly in my personal life. There’s a point, though, where too much of that living mucks with my brain chemistry and skews my priorities.
So I’ve deleted my dating site memberships, and figure I’m taking a month off from ‘gay’, with a possible extension to the whole summer. Maybe it’s silly and idealistic, but the current state of things certainly hasn’t been bringing me joy. (Okay, brief bouts of joy, but nothing lasting.) I’m tired of being kicked in the nuts by people I’ve let into my heart, right when I’m having fun and not expecting it. And there’s so much else I could be doing with the time I spend reacting to this stuff, like making art, not treating my friends as also-rans, or being out in the world instead of trying to score attention from virtual people.
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Meanwhile, I’m re-reading my novel Finitude and making small edits, because I only have one chapter left to write and want to make sure it’s in keeping with everything that’s gone before. It’s not for me to say, but, dammit, I like it. And every single day I see at least one thing mentioned in the news that I touch on in this story; it’s time for it to be out there.
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Freud was once asked the secret to a happy life, to which he replied “Love and work.” Those are the two things I generally try not to talk about on here, but since I’ve already talked about one, I might as well get the other off my chest.
One of the things I was being hush-hush about was a copywriting gig I took on the side. That was published this past week. The end result looks amazing, and the client was over the moon about my work, which was a much-needed boost — finding out that others out there could respond with the same kind of enthusiasm about what I love to do as my existing client has in the past — because there’s always that one stray thought that maybe you just managed to fool them, but couldn’t fool someone else. I haven’t been writing for the main client for several months (I’ve been working on another project), and that was getting under my skin.
So I had a conversation with my editor about where my work with them is headed, because at the core I’m a creative person, and I need my work to be creative. It’s a conversation several people advised me not to have, since it could jeopardise my main source of income, but I had to have it. I’m not someone who can fake it in my relationships to any degree. Plus, these are amazing people for whom I have endless respect — based now on ten years’ worth of proof — so it seemed to me I was underestimating them by not trusting them to ‘get’ it. But they did, and now instead of dealing with this schism in my head about work, there’s a new possibility for bigger things. Phew!
