Where am I? Writing has not been a thing really this month, neither with the Catbirds or DOAB. Why? Because of busy-ness, yes, but is that all? Well, yes. Maybe it just is. I haven’t been willing to struggle, and it is a struggle to work it in. I don’t know what it is. I have been reading more. Maybe it is just a necessary lying fallow-ness, and I am allowed to trust it.

I know how to follow the thread of what I am supposed to be doing, and it is just not what I am supposed to be doing right now. Feels like. Is that true? I don’t want to lose the feeling of “being a writer”. I don’t want to get to the end of my life and regret not having done it. But I also don’t want to push through brick walls just to push through them and then have mediocre results for my efforts that I hadn’t wanted to make anyway, seems more efficient to not push, to just…go with the flow.

And I find this alarming, yes, somewhat. I want to be a working writer who works hard at her craft. But maybe I’ve always gone about it wrong and it is necessary to let things come undone, for there to be an undoing, in order to come back together and proceed in a way that is more sustainable and more me. Ah, because there is the question, isn’t it? How would *I* do this, left completely to my own devices? Without 1000wordsadaycomehellorhighwater rules that someone else came up with, without maps that become meaningless in their execution that I follow anyway, without taking the advice of someone who is getting paid to give me advice and who by the way has never accomplished what I would like to accomplish, without internalizing the societal pressure to make something of myself, whatever that means, before it is too late, what does my own path through this look like? Letting the fields lie fallow while I go about the rest of my yes still quite busy thanks very much life? And not stressing about that? Writing six books at a time (well, right now I have ideas for four) and then publishing them all after many years? I could do that if I wanted to, couldn’t I, if I was enough right now and didn’t need this book in order to prove something to myself and others?

I have spent the first five months of this year focusing on my body, getting lighter and getting my body into a better shape so that I can do things, run, yoga, and feel more like myself and feel strong. (Strong is on the agenda in earnest for the summer.) Talking to another working mother today, she was saying how hard it is to find time to exercise, and I fully agree with her, it’s not easy, it takes up probably 7 hours of my week, and there’s more I could do. Those are 7 hours I am not spending on writing, they came from somewhere. But where am I without my body? My body SHOULD probably be the first thing. And meditation by now is part of who I am and I suspect always will be and will be what I turn to to get me through the really rough upheavals of deaths and separations that are ahead of me (my parents, my self at some point, my kids growing up and leaving, etc.). So that’s essential. And then there is the writing. But these already are three things that mothers tend to not have time for even one of them, my mother didn’t, and the schedules/lives now are even crazier. Yes it is a matter of prioritizing, to a certain extent. But to deny the-game-is-rigged-ness of it is to think you can do it all, that you are superwoman, and then you’re just hunting yourself.

I want to be done hunting myself.

These things are priorities for me feeling like myself, but they aren’t shoulds. I will build a funeral pyre of shoulds and burn them in a Dionysian orgy of fuck you. So how to walk that line? Daily yoga, daily walking, daily writing, plus cooking and cleaning and chauffeuring, plus weeding, plus window staring, how to do this? The minute I think: I should do some yoga, is the minute I no longer want to but feel like I have to and I have become the hunter as well as the prey.

So let’s just drop it, all, for now, and see what happens.