I’ve had a very rough week, and my stress level has reached an achingly dull apex. My dear friend Malika suggested that I put together a “stress plan” for this day. I asked her what her stress plan was, and she told me that she essentially lies in bed and watches tv until conditions improve. I would like nothing more than to watch tv all day, but I know two things about that. First, I will feel like a fake artist, a lazy person, and a squanderer of the sacrifices my husband has made for my non-lucrative career. Second, the collective guilt of the first thing will make me feel like total crap by 4pm. Quite frankly, I already feel awfully close to crap, so I don’t want to add to it. I asked Malika if she feels that kind of guilt when she employs her stress plan. She smiled her deliciously wicked smile and declared, “Yes, sometimes I hear that voice in my head. I tell it to fuck off.”
I have written some. I take a gritty pride in getting a modicum of work done under the worst of conditions. On all of the worst days of my life, some words have been written. I often motivate myself to continue this trend by saying that Frida Kahlo would be painting in my circumstance. I have this great visual from Selma Hayak’s beautiful portrayal of Frida’s life. A woman crippled with pain, curled in bed, but curled around a small canvas where her one free hand is still painting. This time around I have pressed into that motivation and discovered something new. Frida would be painting, but she would not be painting in spite of her pain. She would be painting directly from her pain. She visualized her life and her struggles in these haunting surreal images, and that is what she left behind her.
Lately, with my stress ever rising as the days drag on, I have been trying to focus on being totally in each moment that passes. Right now, in this moment, I am in this painfully stretched waiting. This moment may be forever eclipsed by the news I do or do not get tomorrow (or the day after that, sadly), but this is the moment I’m in now. This is my only opportunity to experience this day, my only hours to document what this feels like. I do not visualize my life in surreal images. I conceptualize it in playful, curling words. That’s what I’ll be writing today.