Too Many Good Things

This is something that my lovely therapist M. (former, since I'm a chump and can't carve out time to see someone right now) used to say to me when I sat in her cozy office and threw up (metaphorically) all of the many many many things that stressed me out and caused me to be a frenetic ball of panic and catastrophe. She would wait for a pause in my litany of "blah blah blah stress blah blah blah work blah blah blah kids" and then say something to the effect of, "You just have too many good things vying for your attention right now." 

She was really adept at reminding me, gently, to be appreciative of my good fortune. As I write that paragraph above, too, I'm conscious of the fact that to have anyone vying for my attention makes me lucky; I could be alone, really alone. Not in a comfortable, peaceful, solitary way of being alone -- like my mornings, when I write (or, unfortunately, as of late -- grade). But the aloneness that feels closed, without opportunity and variety. Endless and without reprieve.

Also, I made choices that brought me to this moment. I need to remember this always. My choices + my actions = my mess. Once again I've said yes to too many things and blammo -- chaos reigns once again. House, disaster. Grading, disaster-disaster. Committee work and other academic nonsense, disaster-disaster-disaster.

There is no other way to triage the disaster than to simply buckle down and do the work. This may happen this weekend -- the kids are off from school for Veterans Day today, so I won't be wholly able to throw myself into grading. But I may get some done here and there. Really, that's just how "doing the work" has to happen -- I'm gonna have to cart my bag of grading (now the size of two toddlers, because I just collected more papers) everywhere with me and do little scraps of it at a time. 

Two things over the past week and a half that have counteracted the bad things and reminded me about my good luck are 1) a workshop I held for a student writing club at Stony Brook University on Thursday, November 2 and 2) my friend and colleague Meredith Starr's art show on November 8. 

The workshop was such a good reminder of what it's like to work with other people who are curious, enthusiastic, and similarly invested in their work. The group of students I led through a series of writing prompts were mostly STEM students: people engaged in really complex, demanding study on a daily basis, who meet every other week to turn on a different part of their brain by writing and sharing poems. After coming face to face with so much resentment and passive-aggressive nonsense from my own students at Stuffolk this semester, it was incredibly . . .  cleansing . . . (I think that's the right word) to meet with students who truly wanted to be there and who were willing to take risks and try new approaches to writing and who trusted me to teach them something insightful, even if it was "just for a club."

(Check out that flyer, by the way. It was billed as a "Masterclass" ya'll -- which seems a misnomer but feels kinda good to see in print anyway.)

M.S.'s show at the S.A.L. Gallery at LIU Post this week was helpful too. Her new work, Repeat Patterns, began last semester and continued, I believe, into this semester, and was inspired in part by the class we team-taught in the spring -- Developing Creative Imagination in the Arts. The drawings are beautiful, spare, careful renderings of pathways, roads, flight patterns, and routes for neighborhood runs: maps of a daily routine lived, and loved.

Floor drawing in neon gaffer's tape

It was that last part that really hit me: this idea of not just appreciating, but really being genuinely enamored with the minutiae and repetitive nature of one's life. M.S. mentioned this at her Wayfarer Gallery's art crit over the summer, and I thought it was charming and inspiring then, but seeing the drawings hung across the space, and marked on the floor in these electric, neon colors that sang "fun" -- it was kind of humbling. I need to stop feeling so put-upon, and focus on being more participatory. 

On the whole I think I am appreciative and participatory, it's just that in these small moments that feel like crisis, I need to remember that they are small, that they aren't really crises, and that I am the designer of my comings-and-goings. 

I received another semi-finalist-status-but-otherwise-rejection email yesterday, with a kind note from the series editor. I don't even know how to comment on that, really. It's an honor, naturally. It's a good thing. But when will this book find its home? Will it ever find a home? And when will I find the time to write another book? How can I figure out a way to say no to most of the good things and not damage my academic career, my family life, my friendships? It's difficult to make time for new projects -- and take time away from my duties at the college, my family (immediate and extended), and my friendships -- when I can't find a home for this manuscript, this project that grows older (but no less loved) with each passing day.