Tuesday, May 1, 2012

When the Madness Ends (also titled: what happens when you can't think of anything to post on your blog today)

my dramatic sunlight-on-face pose to indicate relaxation/relief
Sometimes, that little blogging (and/or writing/designing/composing/creating) light bulb in your brain just turns off without warning.  So you take a break, or focus on another project, or immerse yourself in things that inspire you, or find some other way to gets the ideas flowing again. Or, if you're me today, you document your 'blogging block' struggle and process your feelings about it on your blog, on the internet, for the whole wide world to see.  (Confession: I almost clicked "delete" on this half-way through in favor of attempting to put together a really pretty summer dress collage or a shiny, happy color-themed inspiration post, but I decided to just go with it and keep on writin'.  Because we all feel like this sometimes, and that's real life.)

Yesterday was kind of a crazy day.  I mean, Mondays are always sort of an adjustment period, even when I work on the weekends, because my internal pressure to get back into "accomplishment mode" is at its strongest.  But yesterday was crazier than your average Monday.  I felt excessively sleepy for the first few hours of the day, and then when the coffee finally kicked in, I spent a good seven hours straight frantically trying to cram in as much as possible.  It always feels good to cross stuff of your 'to do' list, but I may have overdone it.  When I sat down to write a blog post for today, my brain felt broken.  I just couldn't think of anything to write about.  It's not like this is the first time this has ever happened (by any means).  It's a pretty common affliction for bloggers and/or creative people in general.  However, I can usually get over it fairly quickly (see opening paragraph to this post).  This time, not so much. And honestly, I still can't think of anything to write about.  So instead I am thinking aloud, and essentially writing about not having anything to write about, and why I can't think of anything to write about, and how this plays into everything else going on in my life right now.  Yep.


I mentioned that my Monday was crazy, but really, my entire weekend was crazy. I spent the majority of Friday through Sunday in between music venues and a hotel room (Robbie's band had three gigs in a row and we stayed at a hotel downtown so he could be right around the corner from them). And the insomnia that decided to pay me a visit last week really overstayed its welcome, so sleep was scare.  I'm not complaining; this weekend provided a nice change of scenery, and it's always awesome to be able to support my husband's career in person.  And I got to hang with good friends who I haven't seen in a while and drink a few beers and dance until my feet hurt.  In fact, I was, for the most part, on my feet continuously from Friday through yesterday. We also had Marg's memorial on Saturday morning, which was beautiful and bittersweet and touching on so many levels.  We slept for a few hours on Saturday night, went to breakfast with friends Sunday morning, then came home and did stuff around the house until really late Sunday night.  Even if I over-committed myself to so many activities that my brain felt broken come Monday, the weekend was a good kind of exhausting. 

I notice that it's almost always the times when I'm overly tired that I struggle to feel creatively motivated.  So after the kind of weekend and Monday I had, my failed attempts at producing an idea for a post would make perfect sense.  But I really think that there's more to it this time.

I've been feeling a shift coming for the last couple of weeks in terms of where the year is headed, and honestly, it's a good feeling after what has felt like an uncomfortably eventful year.  At the very end of 2011, we lost Bubby dog, which was truly one of the biggest adjustments of my life after having him by my side nearly every single day for 16 years.  And then 2012 began with the longest stretch of Robbie being on the road with the band in the history of our relationship, a stretch that continued (with the occasional break) through Saturday night's show. On April 10th, we lost Margarita, and my sister lost her best friend.  There have been a lot of other fairly monumental incidents as well.  It's almost been like a series of electric jolts that have prohibited the possibility of any real opportunity to settle into that unspoken comfort that accompanies a routine. The only thing I can really compare it to is hitting snooze on your alarm clock after a short, interrupted night of sleep.  Every time I've started to let out that sigh of relief that indicates an end to a taxing experience, the 10-minute snooze period has expired and the loud buzz of the alarm clock has smacked me back to reality.  But I have this strong feeling that the madness of these past four months is coming to an end, and that awesome things are on the horizon.  Like maybe I'll be turning the alarm off all together for a while, and actually experience that satisfying sigh that has been indefinitely postponed.


Truth be told, we all feel like this sometimes, and maybe that's why I decided to raise my hand and share my thoughts with the class today.  We all have periods in our lives where a lot (be it good or bad) is thrown at us at once, and we all experience the inevitable come-down as result.  Whether this manifests as the inability to come up with a good blog post or a nagging cold or a need to sleep for 12 hours or something else entirely - and whether we emerge feeling imminent changes or just go back to the everyday life we knew before it - we all deal with it at least a few times in our lives.

This is certainly not the first time that I've had a lot of madness consume everything over a short period of time.  Nor is it the first time that my I felt weary in the aftermath, or positive about good things on the horizon.  When I think back to times of loss, there always seems to have been more than one.  Or when I reflect on times when my husband has been gone for unusually long stretches, I realize that, without fail, more than one major event occurred that I had to deal with on my own.  I think it's almost natural for a domino effect to occur when a crisis strikes.  You attempt to cope with something, then suddenly, some other storm erupts and knocks you down before you were even able to fully recover from the first one. This isn't a bad thing.  There's a reason why we rip off band-aids instead of slowing peeling them away and prolonging the pain.  As exhausted and brain fogged as I feel right now, and as much as I kept telling myself  "omg, what next, I seriously cannot handle one more thing" in the midst of it, I'm grateful that the madness I just emerged from was condensed into a few months.  I remember feeling this exact same way during the early fall of 2010, after a similar period of domino effect-style loss and crises.  I was tired, I felt a little brain dead, and I had a hard time focusing on being creative.  But I also felt all sorts of awesomeness about to bloom.  And it did: I started this blog.

In the cycles of our lives, there will be many times like this - times where the madness comes to an end, and we turn corners, and we watch good things appear.  The older I get, and the more I experience, the more I see the truth in this.  Something substantial will always undoubtedly arise from those times where we're wading through the crap.  Honestly you guys, I think I just proved that to myself while I was writing this post.  After aimlessly staring at my computer screen for longer than I care to admit and eventually feeling so frustrated that I just started typing my random thoughts, I was able to come up with a post. Funny how that worked out!  The same can of course be said for spans of sadness or compounding loss or seemingly endless challenges.  You somehow fight through the pain, then when it finally comes to an end, you're left feeling deflated and foggy. When you're in this place, my advice (to myself as much as anyone else) is to remember what I just said about something substantial arising from it.  Even if you feel a little hopeless, stay as positive as you can.  That way you'll be prepared to make the most of the good things that will appear, the new doors that will open, the joyful surprises that you might just have missed if you hadn't just gone through all that crap. 


Those cliches about the hard stuff making you stronger, and it taking bad things to appreciate the good, and blah blah blah can be really annoying sometimes, I know.  But ultimately, they're true.  When Robbie and I went on our spontaneous adventure, one of the restaurants we visited had the coolest quote ever on the back of the menu by author Bob Perks:

I wish you enough sun to keep your attitude bright.
I wish you enough rain to appreciate the sun more.
I wish you enough happiness to keep your spirit alive.
I wish you enough pain so that the smallest joys in life appear much bigger.
I wish you enough gain to satisfy your wanting.
I wish you enough loss to appreciate all that you possess.
I wish you enough "Hello's" to get you through the final "Goodbye."

I loved the whole thing, but this part struck me the most: "I wish you enough pain so that the smallest joys in life appear much bigger."  Simple, but really powerful, right?  The next time you're where I am now, in that period when the madness ends and you're soooo tired and you find yourself overwhelmed with reflection on all you've just been though, remember that line.  Remember that you just overcame all sorts of obstacles, and yes, it really sucked, but you're even more bad ass than you were before.  And now you get to enjoy all the goodness that's about to come in a way that wouldn't be possible had you not experienced that suffering.  Really, it's a pretty amazing way to look at life.

It's May 1st.  A brand new month.  And that's my post for today. :)

On a completely different but equally important note, see all those pretty new ads over there in the right sidebar?  They belong to our May sponsors, and I seriously couldn't be more excited about this group.  I could easily spend days hanging out on their blogs and shops, and I highly recommend taking a couple minutes to pay them a visit.  You'll be glad you did, promise.  (If you're viewing this in a reader, just click here).


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24 comments:

  1. melissa, here's to being brave, being real, & being true, because sometimes life is hard, even if that difficulty just makes us appreciate & cherish the good even more. so i'll say what i always say, be gentle with yourself. it's okay to not be perfect. sometimes just being is enough.

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    1. 100% agree Teddi! Just being is definitely enough. :)

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  2. Such a great post. I am still in the midst of my blogging block. I am trying not to stress about it too much. I juat can't manage to get re-motivated in that area.

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    1. I think not stressing is key. Easier said than done, for sure, but I think it's the only way to let "the flow" come back. :)

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  3. Oh my gosh this post is so beautiful!!! &funny & awesome!! Thanks for sharing all this stuff & the great advice & positive way to look at things. :-)

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  4. This post has been really inspiring to me! I use to be a creative person who used to really enjoy ther blog! but now things have changed and I feel that part of me isnt there anymore but i want it back! I even went as far to delete my blog a few days ago cos i couldnt cope with the pressure i was putting on myself! This post has inspired me to just do it, if im not happy with it just change it and the creativity will come back!

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    1. It's difficult not to put pressure on ourselves when we want something work, even though it's counterproductive. I think doing what you want to do, and changing things (like you said) allow that creative energy to reappear. Good luck to you lady!

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  5. For not knowing what to write, you did a great job! Great post! Thanks for sharing with us all :)

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  6. I love this post. I love the quote from Bob Perks - especially the line you picked out of it, seems to have explicit meaning for me as me & my family continue to struggle with the loss of my brother in law. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for posting this today. I feel like I needed to read it.

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    1. I'm so sorry for your loss. And I'm so glad that the post helped. xo, m

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  7. Wonderful post! I read every word, and found it all equally inspiring. I appreciate that you took the time to write this out and be really real with your readers. Sometimes I forget that the people behind awesome blogs are just that: people. And they have emotions and problems just like everyone else. This is why I love yours and Laura's (Violet Bella) blogs so much. You keep things creative and pretty, but also down-to-Earth and honest. This may sounds silly, but keep it up! ; ] And thank you!

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    1. So sweet Beckie, thank you. :) I adore Laura (and her blog) as well!

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  8. Great post Melissa! And I love that when you sat down to write you had no idea what to blog about.
    The Bob Perks quote is perfect!

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  9. Everything is always harder when you're overtired...physically, emotionally, creatively. Not that sleep helps much when you've had a devastating loss, but it makes everything else that much harder when you don't sleep, you know? Learning how to clear your mind, or meditate, whatever you want to call it can help though.

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  10. love... you could not be more right with your words and heart in this post. i have felt the same way through my major losses and other life challenges ive faced. that period of fogginess and exhaustion, and confusion. and oddly enough, each time, amazing things came out of it. some took much longer than others, but in reflection, its so true. i think being able to recognize this is the biggest part. its kind of what helped me after losing my dad. since i had already lost my mom, and thought i would never be okay or myself again for a long time after that, and then realized i was okay. and i grew so much as a person b/c of it. that id still miss her every single day and wish for her to be here, i learned i could go on, and i could take my yearning for her and pour it from my soul into my art, and my life. so i took this knowledge that i knew, that can only be gained from actually experiencing this kind of pain, and forshadowed that to my mind when i lost my dad. as much as it hurt (and still does), i knew i would be okay. i could see the horizon through it. but at times, it does bring you a sense of 'what next'... 'when will the next big tragedy hit'... that is a hard one to get over. and until life proves otherwise, im not sure ill ever get over it. im learning to not let that fear keep me from living fully. thats all i can do. ...i can only imagine that you were just sooo exhausted after this weekend with all you guys did. im glad you enjoyed it for the most part, and danced!!! do take some time for yourself, even if its in small doses. maybe you could take some of your moments from your days in the temple and start applying them to everyday life now... if you dont already that is. i love you girl! thanks for pouring your heart out, i can tell just by writing it out it was a bit healing. xoxo.

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  11. this is such a beautifully written post. i'm going to put it in my bookmarks so i can read it again next time i need it. thank you so much for sharing this with your readers, i can't tell you how much i appreciate it.

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  12. wow this was a very inspiring post. i am so glad you decided to write it. i love that quote to pieces. all of it.

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