Blackbird singing

Out of the office window I can see the canal boats drift past and the café tables begin to fill with people. Not people enjoying post work drinks as it's a bit too early, but coffee drinkers, the retired with their papers and their halves of bitter. The young men who come out of the woodwork when the English weather turns sunny. It's barely 17° but the smell of sweat is lingering and there are pints of lager and any minute now someone will remove an item of clothing.

Because I've had an extended weekend, I have returned to hundreds of emails. I quickly feel anxious and overwhelmed and then I remember my mantra for when the day job fills me with feelings of less than and not enough. I am just a woman doing things on her job description. I have many variations of this mantra, for use in times of stress, when a panic attack begins to prickle at the back of my neck I am just a woman walking across a car park, I am just a woman buying milk, I am just a woman sending an email. I find reducing my circumstances to the most basic of descriptions infinitely soothing.

Upstairs in one of the conference rooms a local singing quartet rehearse. The songs filter through to my office and though I can't quite make out the words I know them anyway:

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise

I am thinking about the half bottle of yellow, resiny wine left in my fridge. Tonight I will chop vegetables and make stew. After that I might write for a while. I will finish a painting. I will use my voice even though to do so feels fraught with a hundred unseen evils as well as those I feel familiar with; disappointment, failure, judgement. I will do it anyway. I am just a woman writing a blog. I am just a blackbird singing.

Confessions of a straight lace

This is my 2013 vision board.
Owing to various circumstances I didn't finish it until last week.
I've had the images stashed away for ages, the words rolling around my head. I know how I want this year to feel.
The thing is this: I'm worried about that word Wild. I don't think I am capable of being Wild. Not really.
That woman up there, on that board, she is so intimidating to me right now.
I was teaching my watercolour class yesterday. We were painting images of rambling gardens. Lovely English cottage gardens. Lupins, poppies, alliums. Little stone benches. Willow trees bowing in a light June breeze and little gateways hidden behind over grown foliage. I had one of those rare moments where you actually recognise your own contentment at the time you are feeling it. I had found a little patch of sunlight to sit in. There was the sound of paintbrushes in water and I think I might have heard a cookoo in the distance.
On Monday I will pop over to Hornton, the village my mum comes from. A lot of my family still live there and there will be proper Mayday celebrations. There will be a Maypole. Homemade cake and cider in the pub garden.
I don't know how to be that woman; wild, unapologetic, natural and brave, in these quaint settings. That little word. It just popped into my head without me giving it a huge amount of thought as to what it meant to me. And, of course, in my woefully naive way, I have become worried that it might mean going out when I don't want to, drinking when I don't want to, talking to people when I don't want to, talking to men when I don't want to. I'm worried it might mean accidentally becoming something I'm not. Which I have accidentally done before.

___

Ok. It's three hours later. I very often write blog posts that I don't publish, mainly because they are a bit open ended.
I have decided to define what this word means to me.
Wild.
It means being slightly more audacious.
It means apologising less.
It means tending to my own needs before everyone else's.
It means listening to my body more.
It means calling people out on their bullshit. Quietly and politely. And then probably running away and hiding.
It means, actually, just doing what I bloody well want to do. Without reference to any of the dozens of people I nod at and say hello to as I walk from one end of this small town to the other.

The long road back from nowhere

I'm not really sure where I have been the last few months. I feel like I've been asleep for the majority of the summer; I drifted off somewhere around the end of June and woke up in late September. I have spent the last few weeks pulling myself together and trying to work out exactly what caused me to suddenly beat a retreat from the world. Things had been bad at work and I remember suddenly waking up in July feeling wretched and exhausted. And then it's all a bit of a blank. I took a lot of baths. Finished a few paintings. Grew some tomatoes. And finally came to the conclusion that I had put myself through a bit of a battle this past year.

My plan for 2012 was this: keep exercising (at least four times a week), carry on with writing the book, keep eating healthily, take on a bit more teaching to help with the bills, find true love, paint my living room, be more sociable, be prettier, be better at everything, sell lots of work etc etc. Add to this meditating regularly, visualising regularly and taming my relentless negative inner monologue and suddenly the sensible part of my brain (the one synapse not exercised and self-helped into a state of inertia) went

"Er, 'scuse me? This isn't a lot of fun. Is this how you wanted 2012 to go?"

And the rest of me (particularly my knackered shins) went "No, not especially". And so I took to my bed like a Victorian invalid. Only not really because I still had a full time job. Needless to say it turns out I had Some Issues To Process which I have been doing just like a healthy, modern, balanced woman should do. I'm sure it's all been very useful. The only thing with all this navel gazing is that you forget to pay attention to anything else. I can't remember when the first autumn leaf fell. I don't remember what I was doing during that late summer heat wave we had. I vaguely remember sketching Mevagissey harbour (see images). I'm pretty sure it rained in August but the rest...well. Who knows? And then I was reading through last summer's blog posts and everything about that time came back in a rush and I thought "this is why I do this! This is why I blog- it's my way of paying attention". So I have a new plan for the rest of 2012. Stay awake. Look. Smile. Write it down.

Hiding from the world

I had lots to do yesterday; class prep, 3 paintings to finish and a short story to be redrafted for a monthly creative writing class (FYI this writing thing is really hard! Give me a thing to describe and I'm away but ask me to plot something and develop characters whilst thinking about figurative language and stylistic devices and I'm hopelessly lost. I'm on the verge of throwing my two main characters off the nearest cliff).

Instead I reorganised my books. In order of colour. There was a point, midway through the afternoon, when I thought I might have bitten off more than I could chew.

I think I might start another anonymous blog. There are loads of blogs that I love; painterly ones, bookish ones, cookery ones... but the ones that keep me coming back and subscribing are the ones that Tell The Truth*. About important, trivial stuff. Sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's uncomfortable, sometimes cynical and sad but always sincere. I had hoped that one day I might come back to this archive and find not only a creative diary but an account of what life was like at this point in time for me. What I have found when looking through old posts is a blog with a bit of an identity crisis. The posts that shine for me are the ones when I decide to just spill, regardless. I wonder if maybe I shouldn't have blogged under my real name. People I know read this and, though I know they wouldn't judge, I do hold back because of it. Here are some of the things I'm not blogging about at the moment:

1) Financial meltdown at work

2) The possibility that I might be made redundant and have to move back home

3) The future: what the hell am I doing with my life?

4) The writing thing

5) Weight loss and exercise. I'm not blogging about this because I thought to myself, somewhat haughtily, "this is a blog for creativity and intellectual, important things not something as girly as weight loss". But the thing is, I have lost about 2 stone since Christmas and this has made a WHOPPING GREAT BIG difference to my life. I'm not carrying around 15 years worth of self loathing for a start.

So, there's quite a lot of stuff that I've been editing out of this blog and I'm not quite sure where to go from here. What do you think peeps? Am I just worrying too much?

*The Truth, specifically, about what it's like to be a woman at this point in time. Because this is a heady, difficult, confusing, potentially amazing thing. And we're all in this together. But, God, it's hard. Basically.