Hashtag #blessed...

Back to Hawaii...

One day while Brent and I were talking about life back on the mainland I was talking about times of day I am most motivated and that it was a challenge on chore days. I am motivated in the morning. I go to the gym, I get home and I tackle the number one item on my list. House keeping is often that item. I stay at home while Brent works so I view it as my job to keep the house clean. But on days where I clean house I find it hard to then go sit down and write for a few hours in the afternoon. And on days where I write first I find it hard to then get motivated to clean house in the afternoon.

It's a different mind set. The cleaning and the writing. Now sometimes cleaning is great for my writing because I can work through ideas in my head while I am doing the not super brain draining cleaning. I can talk out dialog when no one is around to hear me saying outrageous things to myself. But that only works if I am actively working on a story. Times where I just need to sit down and force choke out words doing anything else really throws that flow, or lack of flow, off.

As I was explaining all of this to Brent he said, "Why don't you always write first then?"

I was a little taken aback. "Well because that's not my job."

"You think cleaning house is your job?"

"Well, sure it is."

"The house will get cleaned no matter what you do during the day. Either we will clean it together on the weekend or we will hire a cleaning person to do it. But the house will get cleaned."

Okay, so...We talked some more about that. I view writing as something I do for a hobby and what my job is, is to take care of the house. Brent views writing as something I can do well so I should focus on it and the fact that that leaves me extra time for taking care of the house is just bonus for both of us.

It's an odd thing to wrap my head around.

And part of me feels a little badly about it. It's like that #blessed thing you see online all the time. People use it as a way to say their life is SO outstanding while the rest of us silently bite our knuckles at their #blessings and think #punchyouinthenose. Well here I was all of a sudden, #blessed. And I know it's a real gift. The time, that is. I have a friend who is MAD talented. Like crazy good with the words. She's also a mother of two young children and works full time outside of the house. She works her craft though.  Is part of writing and critique groups to get her stuff out there. Does an exchange with me to make sure I'm writing. The one thing she doesn't have is time. Just the luxury of time to sit and write. And here I am with no job, no kid at home, a husband who says, hire a cleaning lady, nothing but time and I'm faced with...what now?

Clearly, since I've been home from Hawaii for over two weeks and I've only posted 5 (now 6) blogs and written pieces of only two other short stories I'm not exactly comfortable using that time yet. I'm really trying to figure it out. How to feel about my #blessings. I don't want to feel like it's a #trap, or #obligation. I write and I read other people's writing to keep from going crazy. How sane would I get if I wrote every day? EVERY DAY?

Hmmm....

Working it out in my head. I know I'm #blessed. I'm incredibly fucking lucky to have a husband who supports me, not only financially but emotionally. Who encourages me to write and to focus on that even though he also knows I'm not ever going to be motivated by money so the odds of this ever panning out in that way are slim to none. That publishing is most likely not in my future. But who still understands that writing, that having people read the words I put out there, that fictional universes and non-fictional brain dumps make me happy. I'm hashtag a lot of things. But lucky is really the biggest one.

So now that I've spent a couple weeks kind of freaking out about the freedom I am going to spend more time writing every day. Some of it you will see. Some of it my aforementioned partner in crime will see. Some of it will be sent off in to the great wide open to see where that leads. But I know that squandering my time would be the worst thing I could do, so the balance is tipping more towards the words and less toward the cleaning. Wish us all luck.