Monkey wrench

What am I supposed to do with this?

No skills for being stuck.

I have no skills for being stuck. I am stuck and I have no skills for it. I have tools to move you through and ideas of how to love away the rut, but for me - oh, hell no. And that is not unexpected, right?

Perhaps you have been reading? Perhaps we know each other? Perhaps you’re on to me before I am? Good, then we are starting with a level of familiarity with the trouble with love. But I don’t think that love is the thing here at all. Rather, I want to use the word intimacy, for intimacy is about trust.

Try this on for specificity: 

There is this creative work I do between, around, below, and above the coaching work of SDYD that hits your inbox here. This effort makes the work I do in the Zoom boxes richer and easier. More fun for all, more sustainable for me, and too, protects the preciousness of the emotions that can attach themselves to ‘careers’ far, far, away from sullying the availability and energy I am able to offer each of you.

That is super important. Work should matter only as much as it needs to. One of the things that the education industrial empire instills is that “what’ we do and “who” we are to be one. Oh, the pain! The ills! The crimes! This distinct lack of individuality can be a nasty after-taste of academic study. School by default is not inflammatory, rather it is in a bit of kindling. And we find ourselves at a party or on a date or any such social encounter offering from our pretty mouths words all about ‘what we do’ as a stand-in for ‘who we are’.

Nothing new, but also true. And a lesson to share and discuss intellectually as much as we can to beat it into our collective brows. So, yes, I do share about my arty work with my coaching clients and encourage them to have things for themselves, too. Not that those things, like me with my creative writing, can exist commercially but also need not to. 

One can go to work. One can go home. We bring our talents to the office as we arrive and take them home when we go. Care, but not so much care is healthy. All the care may ‘feel’ groovy, but ain’t as self-protective as I would, let us say, encourage.  

All quite admirable. Hooray!

Well guess what, I am at a bypass, in a block, banging a monkey wrench, and so angry with the work I am making and not making I can’t even approach the work of fiction that was at once so inspirational. It used to be fun! This is like a relationship dryspell when sex hits the backburner and one is left thinking - can we love in this in between? Will it return? Can I give it time? Can I be here with you and this too?

I don’t know because I lack intimacy. Not ‘in general’, but certainly with myself. Thus, as in many of the relationships where intimacy lacks, trust is either not at all or quickly forgotten when we hit strife.

Tell me, how is that for you? I am curious and I need help - how does strife strike you? When the ease abates and the challenges enter, when there is a choice to choose, the hope becomes reality, when the infant becomes a toddler and the toddler is mid-tantrum - how high is your madness meter? Do you walk away?

Mentioning walking away for the same selfish reasons as I write this - for I am DEEPLY confronted by the very, very, want. I am meeting my monkey wrench head on and reeling back. I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I should not have bothered. I will no longer bother. See, look at me, I am shit and so I am going. No, I will get my own coat and lock the door behind me, if you don’t mind.

This is not proud. This is not wise. But this is, perhaps, relatable. Not the walking away or the freeze or self-hate, but the experience of struggling with a project itself and so forging the trust logic might indicate you should have, you know, given how great you are. That is the hardest thing in a lot of spaces in relation to persons and also activities, the trust that locks in the self-intimacy one holds with oneself.

Talking to you and yelling at me: Even the shittiest shit has, even by chance, done a good and quality thing. And, as true shitty shits are rather hard to come by, statistics would say that you are not one. (Me neither, alright?) Thus, you (me, too) have done well every so (frequent) often, often a good thing or two. There has been achievement and recovery, passion and play. Thus, the nature of overwhelm and confusion is to eat our better memories, our monkey wrenches are hungry and munch away at memories of better times; recollections for struggle and hard-won wins alike. So perhaps we can’t get to those earlier times or instances when you, like I do, feel blinded by the bewilderment of difficulty thinking about how that is the nature of the beast. The trouble can be waited out or plowed through because, well, that is what you’ve done before. 

Lastly, for this shall not to be ignored: quitting is always on the table. Quitting is actually not the right word. I mean that is the only word I know to write, but, in truth, I don’t actually believe there is a thing as quitting. Rather, that maybe or more accurately, that we use the word only because we do not know that walking away from the thing before us is leading to a friendly next pal we yet  know not. To this end, and don’t you dare think I do this very easily, the only way to know what one is to do is to do it. Like try. Try and know the work remains in all its forms - keep your notes! - and if pausing or ending is the thing, that is not final. Or if you, like me in regards to the particular work I write this blog about, do the best you can to push through and find that doing so has created more of a mess than an improvement - just return to first, or the origins of the wrench and try a new way. A new draft. A new piece. A new choice of thought that all the work is good work in that you (oh I so hope me too!) do good work. Even if the work is not usable there is ample value in that it was done by you. Maybe me.

Ok, time wasting and the week's blog complete - I guess I’ll crack that manuscript…