things that are wrong (and right)

I am having some problems.

There is the headache. It has been there, in varying degrees of ugliness, for three weeks. Mostly it's neck pain radiating up the back of my skull. Sometimes it reaches my temples. One awful night, it made it all the way to my eye sockets and down my jaw. When Eric pressed on a muscle on the back of my neck, I felt pain radiating up through the roof of my mouth and into my sinuses.

But this is not the worst pain. What is worse:

I have not felt like a writer.

No poems. Or anything.

After seeing so much, there are not any words. I think my heart has absorbed the great wilderness I have seen. I am grateful for those wild places, but although I've been inspired to appreciate, I have not felt inspired to write.

And I thought I would.

This summer, I don't recognize my own voice. After I write something, I know that it doesn't sound like me. The thing that distinguishes one writer from another, that most important thing: voice. And when I read old poems of mine, the ones I liked enough to make books out of, I feel foolish. Foolish and I don't know what my own voice sounds like.

And I have regrets. I pictured myself in my little home writing studio: the rolltop desk, the pussywillows, the clear light through the window, me in there operating my own little business. Going to work in the morning to that back bedroom. Sitting on the weird, clunky futon to think things over between bouts of real work.

But it's too cluttered. The futon's covered in junk and the desks are a mess. The pussywillows remain hopeful and sweet on the windowsill, but that is all. The peace lily languishes in its desert pot.

It is true that I have paid bills with money from writing and editing, but it isn't enough and my words do not sound like me. I find this disturbing.

And I have struggled with productivity.

I didn't cut the peonies when they were blooming outside in the front bed. I didn't even support them. I just let them bloom, droop heavily to the ground, and die. I could have relished their enormous happy faces, but I let them turn to the ground. They're hard as rocks, now, the dead blossoms. Like brownish-red softballs of my own neglect.

I have two new potential freelance jobs, waiting at the other end of the phone I haven't picked up. I have no reason not to call. To introduce myself (and we've already spoken through emails) and be a grown-up with a real job and life and everything, but instead I've just flipped aimlessly through cookbooks on the couch, thinking about soups that take all day and an endless parade of baked goods. What is wrong with me?

The insomnia which plagued me off and on all winter has returned in summer form. I am sending emails to people at 4:30 in the morning, because I am too anxious to sleep; I am anxious about all of the things I should have been doing when I whiled away half the day lying in bed, telling myself "thirty more minutes" over and over.

And I worry about not doing the right things to make Eric happy.

And the idea of tidying the house every day is inconceivable. And the sheets need to be washed. It seems this summer something always needs to be washed.

These are mostly problems that could be fixed. If I could just make myself have some more ambition, or if I could at least exhibit some control over my own sloth-like behaviour, or something.

I cannot remember the last time I submitted anything anywhere to anyone.

However:

I have ridden horses through green fields at a full gallop, I have gone swimming in prairie lakes and the Atlantic ocean, I have seen stars against the blackness of the sea and sky together, I have felt sun-saturated and sleepy in early evenings, I have baked pies for my family and felt pleased with myself, I have been married one summer, and most importantly, I have felt blessed.

And these are things which I truly love.

But something has to change this fall, or I will wither away in our little house, voiceless and unproductive in such a messy bed. This cannot be the nature of things.