The house is a mess.
That’s where I’m at. It’s where I’m stuck. The house is a mess and I cannot function in this chaos.
I can hear my older children cackling maniacally in their bedroom. They’re meant to be asleep and it’s fingernails on a chalkboard.
They’re meant to be asleep and instead they’re in there laughing and throwing things. The house is a mess and the children aren’t sleeping and the TV is too loud and someone has lost the remote because the house is a mess.
It’s everything and nothing all at once.
Move through this space for long enough with stories so big you can’t tell them and you’ll find your words disappearing too, all the while the house is a mess and the children are too loud. Everything is too loud. Too hot, too cold, nothing is just right. I’m Goldilocks and everything is broken, ruined forever, or wrong.
I miss writing.
—
The baby turns two in less than a week and I wonder where that time has gone. Of course I wonder where the time has gone. I spend a lot of time wondering where my time has gone.
There’s 7 weeks until we launch our business and I don’t know where that time has gone either. I spend hours daydreaming about soap, oils, balms. I wonder where the line is between beneficial and therapeutic, how to label, where to advertise. I make, create, tweak, test, retry. I take notes. I am writing, but this isn’t writing. A book of recipes and notes isn’t writing.
Did I remember to jot down what happens when you add blue mica before the lye water? Did I remember? I don’t think I did. It turns green, in case you’re wondering. A beautiful sea green, but not the blue I was after.
I’m a soap maker now, but I’m a writer too, and I miss writing.
—
All my websites languish under the weight of stories not told. Of disability, and disadvantage. Stories of triumph and failure. Winning and losing. I’ve lost my thick hide, jabbed too many times in the soft places and I am all full of holes.
How do I tell stories now? How do I tell the truth when my truth brings out the witch hunters with their pyres and fires.
Witch, witch. Burn the witch.
I don’t know what I’m doing any more.
—
I miss writing.
I start antidepressants in the morning. Last time I couldn’t write on them. Now I can’t write anyway, so maybe they’ll change something. Maybe it will be better.
Who knows.
