Last night, I called my mom to say hello before going to sleep. I had just had a terrific band rehearsal, and I was excited to share my experience with her. My mom and I are very close, and we talk at least once a day, often several times a day. When I called, we said hello, then I said, “It’s your daughter calling!” Sometimes I like to do that – it feels warm and fuzzy.
As soon as the words came out of my mouth, however, I got anxious that my mom might do what she did a few months ago when I said that – namely, excitedly ask if it was my sister calling. This time, however, she just warmly said something like, “Yes,” which left me feeling relieved.
But then she added, “Which daughter?”
Which daughter? Not only did it rattle me that my mom wouldn’t know my voice, given that whole talking-multiple-times-a-day thing, but there is a long and sordid history here about my sister’s behaviors over the years, and my mother’s responses or lack of responses to it – all of which got triggered in that instance. I told my mom I needed to go, and I hung up the phone.
At about 4:00 am, just three and a half hours after going to sleep, I woke up, with all the associated angst swirling around in my head. It’s not uncommon for this kind of thing to happen. While I have incredible abilities to channel my energies into positive and healthy directions, despite all the crap that has flown at me over the years, I am vulnerable in the middle of the night. When I get up to pee, all those shadowy demons launch their attack. Unresolved issues churn through my brain, unrelenting.
In the past, I have gotten out of bed if I was not able to get back to sleep within about half an hour. Isn’t that what all the “sleep experts” advise? I have found, however, that I am often dragging through whatever I am doing. Inevitably, two or three hours into it, my energy crashes, and I have to go back to sleep. My daily rhythm is then interrupted, and I feel thrown out of whack. If I stick with it and just stay in bed, however, I find that I can usually fall asleep again within two hours. So that is what I typically opt to do, and what I opted to do in this case. Three hours into it, however, despite trying meditation and music CDs, I gave up and got out of bed.
I have a client who says that bad things are just good things trying to happen. While I think it is naïve to believe that – I think there’s just some straight up yucky shit that happens in this world – I do like the orientation. I always have approached circumstances of my life with an eye to what spiritual juice and positivity I can get out of any situation, no matter how awful it may seem at the time. Seeing bad things as good things trying to happen kind of bumps that approach up a notch.
In this case, I thought, well, I have been wanting to write my stories for eons now. And while I have done that intensively for stretches of time, I have not been doing it in recent years. My focus has been on songwriting. I never seem to have enough time to do all the things I want in a day, and I just have to make priorities. However, I know that I need to get my stories down onto paper and out into the universe. So, shortly after 7:00 am, I gave up on sleeping and decided to do just that.
A few years ago, I read The Artist’s Way, which suggests writing something like four pages every morning, no matter what the circumstances. It’s one of those non-negotiable grounding practices. I did it for a stretch and really liked doing that. It was truly grounding, and I felt I was making progress in getting my stories down. But still, it never felt like enough, and I was often journaling about things on my mind, as opposed to writing down my epic sagas.
Part of the difficulty, or perhaps the main difficulty, of writing down my epic sagas is that they are, well, epic. It feels overwhelming to begin to broach writing about them. And there are multiple epic sagas in my life. Also they are highly charged. So I struggle regularly with the tension between living in the past, in the interest of releasing the past, or just saying fuck it and focusing on the present.
But the problem is that when I do not write down my stories, I go mute. I forget the details. And as I noted as a very young child, all of about seven years old, “The truth is in the details.” The tiny little minutiae. I saw that adults glossed over details about things that happened, and I advised myself never to do that, because that act effectively forgets what actually happened. Those tiny little details speak volumes about the essential energies of what was going on at the time and how, and what it all meant. The broad brush stroke from years away, what we call “perspective,” is our act of casting over the truth of what went down.
To be clear, I think both can exist simultaneously: We can change our feelings about something, once we are far away. But that’s because we are far away. It doesn’t change what actually happened. I find I am most forgiving when I am in a strong, positive, healthy place in my life. But that doesn’t mean someone didn’t behave horrifically years prior.
Anyhow, I intended to sit and write at least some of the story about my sister and mom, but I guess what needed to come out first was the story about sleeping, writing in general, and my process around deciding to get up and write about my sister and mom – the latter of which I will do in a subsequent blog post.
