My plan, bit by bit, is to make a garden inspired by the lyrics of Waking the Witch by Kate Bush. I started with the pinks and posies because they’re less expensive garden plants, and several years back now, I received the red, red roses as a birthday gift that would keep blooming in my garden.
This year they decided to bloom pink.
For reference, this is the same rose bush as the pink roses above.
The same rose bush in 2021
Maybe it’s the unseasonably hot weather we’ve had this spring that has confused them. Maybe they’ll go back to blooming red. Maybe they’ll never be quite the same again.
I’m not going to complain about roses. They’re still beautiful, just not exactly what was planned.
If I were a member of the Addams Family, I’d be Inertia Addams. *sigh*
Me, Facebook, 6/1/2022 (since deleted)
Burn, candle. Burn.
I’d like to be able to say that I lost my creative identity during the pandemic, but it’s not as simple as that. As a person with multiple ongoing health issues, keeping the energy up to continue as a high performer at my day job, which is both necessary and important, and at the same time dry and dull, often takes priority over priming the pump and other self-care.
For a long time, I’ve been able to keep up things up by shoveling tomorrow’s energy into today. But there’s been a cost. It’s been this way for a long enough time that I’ve whittled away whatever energy reserves I may have once had, and my creativity, put on hold for everything else, feels like it’s circling a black hole.
There are all these stories inside me. I can feel them dying. I just haven’t been able to find enough energy to overcome my creative inertia.
Self-care and priming the pump cannot be my last priority any longer.
Giving myself time to exercise, time to do physical therapy, time to get out into nature, to bike, to knit and crochet, to read things that are purely for enjoyment? These things are not just fuel for my writing: they’re the fuel for everything.
So, this month, I’m burning down Inertia Addams and rebuilding myself from the ashes, one little blog post at a time.
