A strange and terrible journey of a week

Forgive me.

I am all over the place this week. On Monday I was soaring high amongst the clouds of potential, giddy on the thin air, revelling in the journey. On Wednesday I landed badly in an awful jungle, populated by dark trees with foul smelling roots. By Friday morning I had worked my way into a stinking swamp, and was being sucked downwards rapidly.

Then a rope landed in the mud right in front of me – splat! I looked up to see another part of myself standing on some solid ground up ahead. It was sunny, where she was. She waved. I didn’t.

“It’s ok!” she called. “You’ve only been doing this for two months. And you’ve got all this other stuff going on too.”

I pouted at her. Bloody optimists. I hated her.

“No, really!” she called. That’s the thing with optimists; they just don’t know when to bugger off. “It’s really ok. You can do all of this. It’s just going to take some time.”

Reluctantly I took hold of the rope. She began to pull. So here I am now, caked in mud, sitting on the edge of the swamp whilst she goes and ferrets around in the undergrowth, looking for flowers and fruit to cheer me up. Wish she’d bring me an Ipod. That would cheer me up.

So there’s some Stuff going on. It isn’t fixed yet. I’m frustrated. Can you tell? My sentences are much shorter for one thing.

Gah!

I stumbled across Seth Godin’s idea of The Dip today, that when you start a new thing it’s all brilliant at the beginning, then there’s a point where it gets harder and not so exciting anymore. I’ve been so through so many dips with my book that I’m surprised I can even see the horizon anymore. This week I had a mini-dip about this blog. Natural, I know, I come across blogs all the time that look a bit neglected, with the last post saying “I’m doing some other things now, got to think about what I want to do with this blog, back soon!” And that post is five months old, and there ain’t no-one coming back to love it.

I’m not at that point with this one. But I have tied myself up in a few knots about it. I’m good at that you see.

It wasn’t like I haven’t had anything to write about, far from it, but I found myself worrying about how people might react. There are people who come back here often, and who are kind enough to comment. I love that, I want them to keep doing that – what if I posted something that put them off?

One, I fear, would roll his eyes if I talked about the emotional side of writing. One would get angry if I talked about some other writing stuff knocking around my brain. One would be upset if he knew how I struggled this week. And there is something else going on that I just can’t talk about here. It’s secret and everything.

So I did two things.

1: I ended up not writing anything at all.

2: I wondered whether I should start up another blog somewhere else to talk about things I was worried might turn some people off here.

Thankfully, now I am sitting on the side of the swamp, and not in it, I can see that the first of these was unfortunate (now being rectified) and the second was just silliness. I can write about anything I like here (apart from that secret thing) and will just have to accept that not everyone who comes here regularly will love every post. After all, I can’t expect to please all readers all of the time.

This week hasn’t been a total loss. I have been editing. I have tried Twitter, and found it deeply alienating, but I will persevere, if only to keep up with Stephen Fry. And just now, I have even started to look at Facebook. Oh. My. God. What a can of worms I could be opening.

There are lots of bits of my life that are compartmentalised from each other. It used to be worse, there were groups of people in my life who were entirely unaware of other groups and who I was when I was with them.

Here I am the writer. I may bring other bits of myself here too, but not tonight. I have editing to do. And mud to scrape off myself.

“It will all happen,” I hear that optimistic one saying as she returns from the bushes. “Just not as soon as you want it to.”

Typical. Bloody optimists. And she hasn’t got an Ipod. Damn it. I’d better go do some editing instead.

Oh no wait a minute! Look what she found! Maybe things aren’t so bad after all.