Diary Of My Week As A Mildly Despairing Person Who Needs To Shut Up And Stop Whinging
Includes: Flu! Parenting! A Road Trip! A Deadline! Reckless Spending!
This week was a real slog. I had begun an entirely different essay for this week’s newsletter about recommitting to the creative life after a big setback. And that essay is still en route but in the meantime I felt compelled to catch you all up on some drudgery. Hooray, you say?! Exactly. Hooray. Hoooo-fucking-ray.
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So. I did a diary of my week once before and because lots of people said they liked it, I thought why not do it again but this time make it SEXY… By having the flu for the duration.
Frankly (and I may be alone in this), I cannot get enough of the minutia of people’s lives. I think it’s why I love Rosemary MacCabe’s money diaries so much. It’s not just to gasp and wince at her impressively devil-may-care spending but also to hear all about the tiny details of her days. So if that’s your kink too, I hope you will enjoy this breakdown of my week as a miserable little shite.
First a little before and after shot to set the scene. On the left you will see that I am in the prime of my life, hale and hearty and full of cheer. Well, not quite full of cheer. I’m over-thinking this choice of outfit but even overthinking is a marker of health in my opinion. Overthinking, when done right, is quite an athletic pursuit.
On the right things have nosedived and I have devolved into a clammy, cranky Bed Goblin.
It all started innocuously enough with a lovely breakfast meet up with one of my bookclubs where we ate and dissected the various people on social media that we are fascinated with. I made muffins, my friend brought homemade granola, another supplied the yoghurt and berries and the last brought chocolates.
It was gorgeous and I love these women and our meet ups but truly fuck them from the bottom of my heart because there is a chance, however minuscule, that it was they that brought the plague upon my household and I need to nurse that grudge goddammit. A little while after my pals left, my children came home from school and I would like to also pause here to tell THEM to go fuck themselves because there is, let’s face it, a far higher probability that they infected me – especially the youngest one who was no doubt harbouring some Junior Infants Turbo Virus.
Friday kicked off with a lovely, calming Magic Writing Hour – I was still feeling fine with no idea of the horrors that awaited me. During Magic Writing Hour, a low-lying panic began to simmer over a short story that I’d been trying to crack for several weeks. Stories and novels are funny old things. Sometimes they appear out of your head fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus and sometimes it is a very arduous and uncertain process that must be worked at. I think when I first started out writing, if the words and story were stubbornly refusing to come together, I’d worry that there was something fundamentally off-kilter about the work and I could easily get spooked into thinking the story wasn’t ‘meant to be’ somehow.
Now, after seven books and countless essays, I totally reject that notion. I fully believe that every story can be brought into being with the right approach. Unfortunately that approach tends to be different for every novel and story so there’s a fair bit of trial and error required. I see it as being like the right key meeting a stiff lock, it requires a bit of ‘going at it’ which is not the most writerly-sounding advice but there it is none of my work has ever not required a bit of going at it until finally something gives in the process and the key turns and the story unlocks. The things the story or novel needs reveal themselves and what it needs will often feel, in retrospect, so obvious! I even find that the more obvious the solution, the more comfortably it nestles into the story, the more confident you can feel that it was the right move for the work.
So what kind of key-jiggling usually works for me? Mostly leaving the lock alone for a bit but when I’m on deadline that’s often not possible so I go at it by force – again not the most writerly/holistic-sounding advice. My version of force is bedding in at my desk with white noise in my ears and doing some fevered reading in and around my subject to spur the ideas in my head. As you can see below, in the case of this story, which is destined for an American Horror Anthology, my unlocking involved texting my friend, Rebecca a few cry-for-help messages, reading up on the historical jumping off point I’ve chosen for the story, spending some happy hours delving into Duchas.ie researching old Irish customs and superstitions and making handwritten notes about the things I knew needed to be in the narrative even if I wasn’t sure where they needed to go just yet.
By the way, if you’ve never checked out Duchas.ie do so immediately. It’s an amazing digitised archive of the Irish National Folklore Collection, one of the largest folklore collections in the world.
By the end of Friday, I had a passable first draft minus a proper ending ready to send to my endlessly generous-with-her-time friend, Louise, who is my trusted reader when it comes to the messy unformed early drafts. I usually at this point in the process need outside eyes to confirm that it’s not a disaster and to give me a good reader-impression in terms of where the plot is too thin and where questions in the text are not resolved in a satisfying way.
That afternoon, I took my eldest to karate in our gym – we have a new family membership and it is truly the best thing we’ve done in ages. While he was at his class, I used the hour to go and do my workout. I usually work out in the privacy of my home because I am allergic to exercising around others. I think this is a hangover from school days when I was deeply self-conscious and literally felt like some kind of lumbering, uncoordinated, hideous beast when trying to do any physical activity.
Since becoming an adult and being able to identify the exercise I actually like, I’ve discovered that, in fact, I love being active and since then it’s been crucial for my sanity. Running (very slowly, maybe more of an amble really) has been my consistent go-to for nearly 20 years, as has yoga. Alongside that, I have variously been into pole-dancing, reformer pilates and other passing whims. This year has been the year of weights and I am mad for it, especially as I do an online programme so I can get it done at home often while making dinner in between laundry and homework time. But with the new gym situation, I’ve been dipping the toe into public sweating and let me tell you… not a single person has recoiled in horror at my sweaty, clunky body in motion.
On Saturday, I gave the writing a rest and instead parented the hell out of my kids. All the usual weekend stuff: pancakes, walks to the park, standing at the GAA pitch, swimming pool, force-feeding them screens so I could sit and read. It was during all of this that a creeping feeling of profound unwellness began to assert itself. An ominous tightness in my throat with a side of razor blades when I swallowed. As the day wore on I began perpetually cycling through being shivery and cold and hot and clammy. Soon I was horizontal, clutching the couch and attempting to ride out relentless waves of nausea. Somewhere during this time, it appears from my emails that I managed to send the short story, now with ending, to my American editor.
Natch, my husband had gone away for four days on a Lads-Lads-Lads holiday and my children, the lads-lads-lads I had made myself, couldn’t give less of a shit about me. They built forts around my ailing body and stood outside the bathroom door demanding crisps while I vomited thunderously on the other side.
My mum was also away so not only could I not plead with her to help me, I was also getting near-constant phone calls from her alarm company to tell me that her alarm was going off and that I needed to drag myself over there yet again to turn it off.
Parenting when sick is a really special experience because not only are you surrounded by miniature sociopaths who don’t give a flying fuck about you, you also still need to do everything for them. And I mean everything. I’m still in the arse-wiping stage with one of them. Picture pausing mid-vomit to wipe the arse of another human being.
The other problem with having kids while sick is that they still need to be brought out at least once a day. They need to be run like dogs or else they will fully dismantle the house and tear each other limb-from-limb with all their excess energy so once a day I had to pile on five jumpers, a coat and a mask and sit on the bench of the park trying not to pass out while they ran around screaming.
Sweet friends offered their assistance but in my compromised state, I couldn’t even really figure out what to ask them to do except travel back in time and stop me from having kids.
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