Severed dog toy leg. Neglected.
I’ve neglected posting anything for a while. I’ve been in a memoir writing class, the second that I’ve taken with Left Margin Lit in Berkeley. I’ve enjoyed and grown from both and plan to take another soon. It’s an honor to be in these classes with others with stories far more compelling than mine. Let’s just say, you don’t plan to write a memoir if you’ve led an average life.
One thing that I’ve learned from this last class is the need to focus my theme. I was thinking about it not only in regards to what I might write as an essay, collection of essays or a larger piece, but frankly just this blog, itself. It started as a forum for my thoughts as I dipped into a serious mid-life depression. I questioned the future, my ability to predict it or live it, given the path I’d lain before me. All of that is probably still true, but in teasing out some of the reasons for my depression (my chronic health issues, motherhood, career, etc.), as well as a strong cocktail of medicines and physical regime, it (meaning my mental state) has grown manageable. Or I’ve grown completely resigned. I suppose that could also be true. My need to write in this forum – in particular – seems to have waned. Instead, I’m jotting notes to myself in evernote, google docs, or iOS voice recordings. I have been writing in a paper journal again, something I decided to do after combing through the journals from my 20s and regretting how little I had other than photos to record the existence of my thirties and forties. With each turn of focus from one forum to another, I find myself feeling guilty for neglecting the others.
If I consider it, I might honestly attribute much of my anxiety to feeling neglectful. Neglecting my children, my parents, my husband, my many beautiful friends, my career, my health, my writing, my dogs, my cats, my house, my bicycle, my plants, and even my clocks. So many things that I have taken on to tend, and none of which I can give adequate attention.