The View is Different from the Driver's Seat

I'm embarking on a new journey in my life and I find that the view is different from the driver's seat.

And nerve-wracking!

I finally got my nerve up after about a month of having my permit and doing nothing with it and got behind the wheel yesterday.

And I drove around, hubby in tow, for about an hour and a half. Drove all over the outskirts of our small town to get me comfortable and I even left the county and drove down to Barren River Lake.

I can't say I wasn't scared—I was. And I'm scared of the next time I go out driving. Most would probably think I'm too old to be scared like this, but as I said in my blog post On The Road Again this year is a year of living bravely and I hate to admit that since I got my permit and then got sick the middle of last month, I haven't been very brave at all since then. I'm sure that the fear wears off after a bit of practice, but....

After we went through a month where each of us in the house were sick, my defenses are down and for me, being sick did nothing more than leave me feeling weak and tired and unmotivated in nearly EVERYTHING. My mini-vacation for Spring Break just left me wishing I had more time to simply relax and visit in my hometown, but responsibilities called me back. Kids have school to finish up and I have a household to take care of.

I had a nice time while I was up visiting my family and friends. I always do because it's where I'm the most "ME"- where I feel the most freedom and happiness- It's the place where I can breathe and feel brave and grounded again, which is something I haven't in a long while. Leaving from there always hurts just a little too much because my roots are there.

But I digress...

I need to find my bravery again and that also hearkens back to my lack of focus recently. Driving yesterday gave me about an hour and a half of time to direct my concentration- to do something that forced me to live bravely and focus—on the road ahead. I'm not sure if I mean that literally or figuratively, but I suspect it's a little of both.

I had a week away and I've had a week to try to get back into the routine, so I think starting today, this coming week— it's time to start focusing on the road ahead of me...not just when I go out to practice driving, but in everything. It's time to "force" myself to live bravely again and find focus in all things in my life. As my mom told me a while back, I need to make a plan and work that plan. If I want to make changes or see changes in my life to make me happy and get me where I want to go, I have to actually do something about it.

Hopefully I'll find that the view from the driver's seat becomes less scary—awkward—foreign and more like second nature—something common place and normal for me.

Writing Life Out of Focus

Springtime, warmer days, pretty flowers, Life- are all knocking me out of focus.

I can't seem to concentrate or get my head back into what I should be doing now that Spring Break has come and gone. The break away didn't do anything to help redirect my train of thought or help settle the rumblings of change in my soul as far as writing/critiquing goes.

Instead I'm thinking about how I need to declutter the house, keep an eye on my spring flowers in the yard that are starting to come up, anticipating the imminent arrival of the hummingbirds and looking back over March, which was such a sick month for everyone in our household and it doesn't seem to be getting any better where health issues are concerned.

I'm okay- typical stuff- allergies/sinuses. Hubby though is still fighting off illness. First of the year he got debris in his eye at his previous job and had to deal with the infection that arose from it. Last month he had a bacterial infection in his lungs but they also decided to check everything else—diabetes and thyroid tests came back fine, but they were concerned about his constant fatigue lowering his immune system, his excessively high resting heart rate and well, he's had pneumonia a few times in the past 5 years, so the doctors are always concerned about the scarring on his lungs and the fact that he's had it too often for his lungs to heal properly. Of course, the exhaustion led them to ask questions about his sleep habits and whether he snores, wakes up a lot and how big his neck is.

After measurements, chest x-rays and a consultation with a sleep doctor, he was told his esophagus is too small and his tongue is too big and the reason he wakes up off and on all night, it's because his brain is waking him up because he's suffocating on his tongue. His heart rate is high because it's working overtime for him and we found an answer to why Ambien never worked for him years ago-

When he had pneumonia in 2006, the doctors gave him that to help him sleep and instead it was the absolute reverse, it kept him wide awake. The sleep doctor told him it was because that pill, and most like it, is a muscle relaxer and your tongue is a muscle, so when he took the pills, his brain refused to let him sleep because of the possible consequences. He will have to go to a sleep study sometime soon, but the doctor seems certain he has sleep apnea and when he asked what would happen if he chose to go without treatment, the doctor told him he will die.

Of course, just when we thought things were settling down, he got a staph infection in his nose and we've been dealing with it this week. It wasn't getting better after the first round of antibiotic treatments over 3 days time—if his nose was still swollen, red and irritated they told him to come back to the doctor so he went yesterday. They were concerned because it had spread onto his face and up into his sinuses and they were worried about it moving into his brain and killing him, so they sent him to an ear/nose/throat doctor who changed the antibiotics and ointments up to something stronger.

This morning he said he's been able to drain the infection out some and his nose isn't nearly as red and swollen as it was, so we're hoping this helps and gets him on the road to recovery.

As with most things, you can't plan ahead too far- we live Life unwritten and out of focus most of the time as it is, so perhaps my writing is out of focus at the moment, but I've had to turn my attention elsewhere because that IS Life and we sometimes have to write Life out of focus anyway.

Have a great Friday and wonderful weekend everyone- Write On- whether in OR out of focus!

Voices...

It's happening again...

The voices.

No, I'm not paranoid or schizophrenic...It's just the voices of characters crawling out of the woodwork and milling around in my head...

I kid you not.

This isn't the first time and probably won't be the last. The biggest difference is that I'm hearing male characters introducing themselves instead of my heroines.

The other night I heard a couple of names, but now they are only mist- I can't capture them, but I got the distinct impression they are part of new stories my psyche is attempting to introduce me to. As if I don't already have a dozen or more ideas buzzing around my head that I've yet to write...now I have new fellas trying to get my attention...

Flattering, don't ya think? LOL

I even had a villain introduce himself to me yesterday. I know he's a hard ass and he isn't a great guy, but that's all he gave me at the moment. Just a name and a general idea of who he is, but not where he is, or what he does for a living...I did a "bing" search of the name and found no one with that name specifically, but I did find a man with that first name working for a construction company with the last name and wonder if perhaps construction should be his line of business.

I know bits and pieces about construction workers...my father is one and I could ask him questions about the business if this character "grows" into something massive...but then, I couldn't have him be the business mogul over a construction company by that name...so I guess I'll have to wait it out and see...

As of right now, he's just a dusty little particle floating in the ether around me, waiting for me to figure out where he belongs. And the same could be said for the mystery men who introduced themselves the other night as I was just about to doze off. Wish I could remember what their names were and what glimpses I got from them of ideas. It's still there in the back of my mind I'm sure, just a matter of finding the right net to catch those fleeting butterflies.

I do believe the inspiration that has been hibernating within me is awakening again. My dreams in recent weeks have been far more vivid than usual and far more absurd. I dreamed of Ewan McGregor playing in a movie where he was a plain man in prison for a crime he didn't commit, but he was in there with infamous criminals and villains like Adolph Hitler and Al Capone.

I know what you're thinking— This chick's CRAZY!— but I never said it made sense! LOL

Last night the most significant thing I remember from my dream was that I was pregnant and telling someone that I couldn't lose my weight until after I had the baby in December. {scrunched eyebrows}

Now- I'm not pregnant and I don't plan to be, but in dreams, pregnancy doesn't always mean it in the literal sense.

Sometimes it means you are "pregnant" or heavy with new ideas that are about to be "born" or are growing within you.

Now that actually makes sense to me with how vivid my dreams have been lately and all the voices that are emerging and wanting to talk to me. The month I'm not sure about, but I do feel like I've got a lot of "unknowns" swirling within me- roiling and bubbling there- things I haven't yet gotten a grasp on, but I will...perhaps by the end of the year...

Now that's a thought...

Hey voices! Keep talking!

Hope everyone has a great start to their week...March has nearly marched itself right on out of here.

Walking, Talking Contradiction

I feel like an enigma to myself sometimes.

I try not to be skeptical in regard to love and romance. I mean, really...if I didn't believe in it, I wouldn't write it, but there are times when I wonder how much of it is a great lost art and find myself scoffing at the cheesiness of movies and stories that I would normally love and need a box of tissues for. It makes me question why I'm straddling the fence between being a hopeless romantic and a cold-hearted cynic.

It's then I start to wonder when I lost my touch. I used to have it...I would swear to it! I used to know how to flirt and get a response. It was second nature- not that I was some sort of seductress or anything...but I had my fair share of men who were attracted to me in my youth.

So what happened???

It bewilders me how I can describe the perfect kiss, the pulse pounding first flirtation, the soul binding connection of a love scene, but when I try to flirt with my husband, it falls flat and isn't taken seriously.

Of course, that could be because I am confusing fantasy and reality—Youthful ignorant bliss with the sober naked truth about relationships between men and women. I'm feeling a bit jaded today.

I'd like to strip away the delusions and find the purity and beauty of love again, for I fear I've lost it somewhere beneath the layers of motherhood, of being a "spouse" more than a lover, and the simple complexities of living life day to day without giving any real thought or meditation to really LIVING and FEELING.

I live in this void- caught somewhere between this paradox of ambiguity....Accepting that I feel nothing most of the time but a sense of responsibility to everyone around me but myself.

When life slows down momentarily and I find pause to really contemplate where I am, who I am, and what I'm doing with my life, I find myself wishing I could feel the way I have before- in the past.

I wish to feel the freedom and wild abandon I once did when I loved without reservation- when I loved with all my heart without question. When a flirty touch of the hand or a quirky smile could set my pulse racing and looking into the eyes of the man I loved could nearly pound my heart right out of my chest because we belonged to each other and we both KNEW it without a shadow of a doubt. It was destiny- fate....

The soft pressure of his lips on mine could send a quake through me—a quickening—and when his hand rested over my left breast at the very same moment he looked deep into my eyes, I knew he could feel my heart beating in time with his, forever beautiful, forever bound to one another. It was hard to separate where one of us ended and the other began, but I lost that somewhere.

I believe in love- I really do- I believe in the happily-ever-after kind and I believe in soul-mates, but I also know that losing your soul-mate destroys a part of you and it screws up your ability to believe in those happily-ever-afters. Maybe that's why I find myself mocking true love and romance so often. Maybe that's why I sometimes struggle so hard when I'm writing because I'm not sure I believe it anymore and I don't understand why I bother to write about it because it feels like ancient mythology to me. Maybe that's why I lost my mojo- my touch.

So now—when my husband doesn't take me serious when I flirt with him, I feel like the brunt of a really bad joke. I want to feel needed—wanted—accepted and desired. I want to feel that ethereal glow and the beauty of a deep abiding connection again, but instead I get teased.

Nothing hurts an already damaged heart more than being scoffed and poked at. Or worse yet- disregarded as silly foolishness...especially by the one who is supposed to guard and protect that heart forevermore, who's supposed to understand that human touch and interaction is a necessity for the heart to carry on. Maybe it's neediness—desperation—but it matters.

It really does...even to a walking, talking contradiction....