Writing

Year 4, Week 48: The Bookshelf

I get the affection for the single life: time and space for your own time and space… your own habits, your own choices. You don’t have to compromise with anybody, double-check plans, or keep yourself from watching a Netflix show because your partner isn’t home yet (ugh, so glad we’re over this now. Kind of).

But my appreciation keeps growing for this marriage thing. This time, it’s thanks to the black Ikea bookshelf. It’s been taken down and set back up eight times in Cody’s life, but four of those times, the shelves have held my books, too. In the home we just moved out of, the bookshelf was in the living room, telling people how much we loved reading and, also, the wall was the perfect size for this literary behemoth. The two bedroom apartment housed our master bedroom and Cody’s office/guest room. In our new home, we could have kept the bookshelf in the living room.

But this time…

This time, the bookshelf has been set up in my own little office. That’s right. We have three bedrooms now, and one of them is my own little room.

Can I just say much how I have missed that and not really realized that I did?

I LOVE having my piano, a desk (where I wrote the majority of my first manuscript btw. My mom asked me today why I didn’t just throw it away because it’s so old and I’m still too unpublished to tell her that, one day, this desk will be in a museum), and A FREAKING BOOKSHELF in MY OWN ROOM.

Cody walked in on me working earlier this afternoon with a knowing smile. He does that sometimes. When I asked him about it, he shrugged and said, “I just wanted to watch you in your little creative space. I knew you’d be in a happy place and I wanted to see it.

…But if you weren’t in a happy space, I would have just shut the door.”

Sometimes I wonder if he jumped out the pages of one of those shelved books.

In hindsight, of course I would love a room like this. I love me time to recharge and just be. And a place to create music? A space to write? A place to read? Why wasn’t this a thing earlier in my marriage?!

To which a small voice reminds me, “You needed time to qualify for a mortgage, remember?”

Anyway. Being able to capture what’s good about the single life in this little room for myself feels like a double-win. I can have my own space AND share the larger home that I absolutely adore sharing with my husband.

And the black bookshelf? It’s so much easier putting back together with someone else by your side.

I can’t wait to add more wall art, but for now, this view makes me really excited. The energy is flowing!

Year 3, Week 1: Fear Can Suck It

I don’t like being complacent. I don’t like when something is so stagnant for so long that it begins to feel like it’s dying. This strong dislike is probably why teaching as a profession sounded so alluring to me.

Now, I know, teaching –from the outside– seems like so much of the same: wake up for school, listen for when the bells tell you you might have enough time to go pee, have lunch at the school cafeteria if you forgot your bag at home, and come home to do more homework (if you have time after all your clubs and sports meetings are over). But that’s just the structure. The real meat of teaching is in all the time in between – the interactions you have with some kids who might trust you most in their world, the frustrations who have with some others whose personalities you just can’t mesh with, and the creativity that happens when make magic happen in your own classroom.

Creativity needs structure. And I have not had enough of it this past week. I’m making moves though – silently staking out different strategical posts to maximize my spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical health. Isn’t that what summer break should be about anyway?

Where does this all mesh in with my marriage?

Marriage is simply a structure. It is a set-up idea created by somebody who thought it’d be a good idea and others agreed with that somebody. In the end, it is a structure created by man. It’s frequently destroyed, re-assembled, or re-interpreted, for better or worse.

But the gifts of the structure, man. It’s something quite lovely.

My marriage allows me to feel complete freedom – which might strike somebody in the throes of their single life as a ludicrous statement. But hear me out – sure, I ‘don’t get’ to run around with all the Fabios of the world, but I have something that gives me more balance and ultimate joy. I am able to come home knowing and trusting that my man is coming home to me. To someone who has placed all their trust in someone and had it destroyed, I will argue that he was simply an arse and shouldn’t dictate your future happiness. But I digress.

Like one of my English professors once told us, “My wife tells me, ‘You can get hungry anywhere, but you have to eat at home.'”

Knowing that I will have a safe place to which I can return at the end of the day gives me the confidence to try a million endeavors and know that I will still have love to tuck me in at night even if I fail.

So I’m making the moves. I’m re-evaluating relationships that have grown stagnant and I am seeing if it’s possible to revitalize them. I am accepting to end those relationships when I realize it no longer has a pulse. I am so looking forward to growing healthier, more vibrant relationships over time. I know there will be empty space, but I’m allowing myself to be vulnerable in that place and looking forward to the journey.

I’m praying with greater earnest, following the “Thank you, I’m sorry, Please give me” method (it takes 5 minutes, but allows me to reflect on my day more intentionally before I fall asleep).

I am reading as much as I possibly can before teaching in August steals away a bit of my leisure time. I’m investigating self-publishing options to publish the first Wife Reflections Guided Journal: 52 Prompts for a New Wife and looking forward to finally finishing my first novel so I can set that up for publication before autumn.

And I just signed up for a 6-week fitness challenge with the hopes that I won’t just be considered “pretty” or “pretty skinny” but “strong” as well. My fear of never being good enough is having its final hurrah. That Ania is gone.

The structure of my marriage allows me to be more daring and creative in every aspect of my life.

Fear can suck it.

Year 2, Week 22.5: How I Won NaNoWriMo 2016

A teacher asked us one year as a “First Day of School” icebreaker what our biggest dream was. I was last to answer, and mine was pretty far-out: “I want to write a best-selling novel one day.”

That became “I want to write a novel one day” and, after hearing my father-in-law tell me with zero doubts in his voice, “You know – you’d write a great book” I decided “one day” wasn’t good enough for me anymore. I hated being all talk and absolutely zero action. I committed to NaNoWriMo – writing 50,000 words in 30 days, with the hope that the first draft of a first novel would be born.

In it’s most basic form of understanding, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month and, in it’s painful form of explanation, it forced me to confront all the ugly parts about the creative process: the doubts, the uncertainty of whether I could even do this, and the temptation to use excuses of “not enough time” or “writer’s block.”

I learned so much about myself in 30 days – here are 6 ways how.

My husband really is my biggest fan. The man stood there like the father he will be one day, demanding I put my cellphone in his hands because it was distracting me. Again. But he’s also the first one to light up in a smile when I tell him I met my daily word count (1,667 per day, to stay on track). He was able to express physically what I felt mentally: pure joy at me embracing what he (we) always saw as my potential.
I learned who I don’t feel like I have to “please.” As a perfectionist, this is huge. I usually do not like sharing ANYTHING until it is ready for admiring eyes, so if you saw my long-faced SnapChats or I sent you a text message asking for prayers or I saw you and grinned, telling you of my progress, that means I am deeply convinced that you would still love me, even if I completely failed and gave up halfway through November. But it’s precisely because I told you that I’m pretty sure I made it. I wanted YOU as motivation because, even though you would have still loved me, I did not want to let you down. So thank you. Ideally, personalized Thank You cards will soon be in the mail.

Special shout-out to my co-workers in the teacher’s lounge who would ask me what my characters were up to that day. In many cases, what we would discuss often-times fueled that evening’s writing.
I learned how to shut off my “inner editor” – that voice that would keep telling me things like “That sentence was stupid” or “That word is so elementary; you’re an English teacher for crying out loud – how could you not be more precise?” By Day 20 when I was 5000+ words behind, however, I didn’t have time for the inner editor. She needed to go, because I needed to write. Fast. (As a result, I also learned how to write faster. Thank Jesus, because I never would have “made it” otherwise).
I learned how to make writing – this often elusive desire and never a concrete practice – a priority. I look back and wonder how I was able to write SO much in such a short amount of time with so many other responsibilities. Turns out that with less TV and way less Facebook and more intentional, prioritized, scheduled “me” time, I was able to do it just fine (and without losing any sleep!). I needed to stop flaking out on that part of myself that just wanted to write. If a part of me kept feeling like the kid that kept getting ditched, well, that stinks, so I had to start showing up.
I really love writing by myself in coffee shops. The vibe makes me feel like I’m legit. Also coffee makes my fingers move faster. Can’t say the same for my brain, but I try.
Students began coming up to me and asking them if I could give them tips for writing a book. Who, me? But I’m not even published yet (Shh, inner editor.. Shh.) One student even wrote her own 30,000 words, with no intention of slowing down. The day she was 3000+ words ahead of me on word count, I knew I had to get back on track. Competition is the best motivation, I’m telling ya – even when it’s against a 14 year old who doesn’t realize she just started a fire under your butt 😀

In short (ha! I’m even more long-winded now than I was before), I guess I just wanted it bad enough. I don’t want Cody to feel like the kid that keeps getting ditched, so I choose to keep showing up to my marriage, too. Turns out the hard work is worth it – and it gave me plenty of material for the first draft of my very first novel.

We’ll see where this gravy train takes us.