A Hard Truth to Swallow

And so to be 35…to be on the heels of a year-long book tour…to be fully self-employed…to be very good at never stopping…

While at the same time, to be aiming for a few more book awards…to have one flight a month now through October…to be planning a wedding…to have planted so many seeds that are coming to fruition with more of exactly what I want to do…

Is an odd place to find myself while also feeling…

Utterly, damn near speechlessly…

exhausted. (Hence my overuse of ellipses in this post. Completing a sentence requires caloric output and a conclusion of thought, which seems beyond me right…now.)

The more I say this out loud, the more I believe it and the more my friends kindly agree. They nod their heads and are happy to hear that I’ve realized how far I pushed myself. They offer space and advice and support. I know what I need to do; I can see it. I need 8 hours of sleep a night. I need to avoid the Internet. I need to do yoga, exercise, and meditation everyday. I need to drink more tea. I need to take weekends off and I need to stop working after dinnertime. No ellipses there, dear readers. Period.

Oh yes, I can envision the importance of doing all these things.

But I have become so practiced in the art of not wasting a single second, that the mere thought of choosing to restore and relax–to learn to care for myself again–feels almost paralyzing.

I’m getting better, though, and what it looks like is something that must be a close cousin to directionless. I’m trying really hard not to go-go-go. So I sit. I refuse the phone, the computer, any written text, damn near everything while I’m eating my breakfast. The effort it takes not to do anything other than eat feels monumental. I fail sometimes. I fail a lot of times. And other times, when I’m forcing myself away from the to-do’s to look out the window and put the pen down and unplug and not even exercise and not even read, what I feel is that scary-relaxed edge of coming down. Of letting go. Of what I hope is the beginning of a summer of returning to my center and re-aligning my priorities so that I can write and love and live for the long haul.