The posts on this page are re-posts from my Patreon page, also titled Dispatches From the Tsunami Zone. Posts appear here for free a couple weeks after they are posted for the patrons subscribed at the $1/month level and above. This post initially appeared on that site before my December break.
I have wrestled with this for more than a week, intending it to be the last post before my December break. It has proved far more difficult than I expected, and I still don't think I got it quite right. I hope it helps me to writer it, and you to read it.
Lately I have been struggling, and I have finally come to the conclusion that I have been having a brush with depression. I don’t think it’s anything clinical, but I do think it has a lot to do with the major changes taking place, and my adjustment to them.
In spite of everything I thought I knew, it seems that there was a lot about retirement that I hadn’t internalized quite as well as I thought I had. The lifestyle changes, the freedom to create, the release of the constraints put on me by the outside (working) world - it’s all there. It’s mostly positive, and on an intellectual level I know that. But somewhere deep down there’s an emotional level that hasn’t seen it as positively.
That’s where I’ve been for several weeks, and may well be for several more. Making those timid first steps into an unknown world.
Three years ago, when I was just weeks from retirement, I thought I had it all figured out. I would have time for all the things I didn’t get to do when I was working. I could write for hours without worrying about having to go to work in the morning. I could read a book at lunch and not have to stop and go back to work. I could watch a movie and knit without worrying about how late it was.
And then, as I have talked about repeatedly, Things Changed. My retirement got interrupted almost before it began. Our planned cross-country road trip was postponed for over a year, and I spent many, many hours at an office I was supposed to have left for good.
The delays, the stop-and-start of my retirement, left me with an unsettled feeling, and the inability to completely adjust to our “new normal,” mostly because there was nothing new about it. I was still going to the office every day, with some major gaps where I didn’t go in at all.
Yeah, that’s easy to adjust to; just ask anyone who’s had to work rotating shifts.
It sucks.
Finally, at the beginning of the summer, I was able to leave the day job for good. I was on-call, still an active employee, but I wasn’t on site for the last several months. Over those months the phone calls became fewer and farther between, going from once or twice a week to once or twice a month. It’s been long enough that I really think I am finished.
Which is the problem.
For the third time I am trying to make the transition from all those familiar status symbols - the title, the office, the name on the list of managers, the questions only I could answer - to being just me, alone with my stories.
That was what I wanted, right? So why am I having so much trouble just DOING what I said I wanted so badly? What is my problem?
Welcome to the Unknown.
I think that pretty well sums it up. I have no idea what really lies ahead. Having my plans so completely destroyed - the return to work, the entire world upended by Covid, economic disruption, exhaustion - left me with the inability to trust in anything.
I made plans, set up schedules, created my own goals, and then completely failed to follow through. Sure, some of it was outside disruptions, but part of it was inside me and it cast a shadow over everything.
I have had flashes of productivity. I finished a book, ran a successful Kickstarter, joined a short fiction co-op. But none of it kept me moving forward. I could complete a project - sometimes - and then stall for weeks.
Then tonight I watched a YouTube video from a maker we have followed for a few years. He was doing work he truly loved, but as the enterprise grew he spent more time being a manager and less time being a creator. Eventually the job he loved turned into just a job, one loaded with stresses and responsibilities and his incipient depression triggered. Work was his coping mechanism, and he pushed himself into 80 and 90 hour workweeks. Tonight’s video was from his second-in-command; the original creator is taking an indefinite leave to address his mental health.
I am nowhere near that level. Right now I am just looking for ways to break the logjam and keep moving, however slowly.
Some things have helped. Completing other projects, like picking up an almost-finished piece of knitting and doing the last bits. Doing short projects, like baking banana bread. Having a friend to dinner for the first time in over two years. Having a very short list of daily tasks that I can get done in the first hour of the day.
I will keep looking and trying things. I’m planning at least one, maybe two, cookie-baking days over the next week. I am working on an audio short story to share here. I’ve got a couple novels in process, and I’m doing small knitting projects. Yes, those are all over the map, but I am trying to encourage my creative nature to come out and play again, and to trust that this time we can keep playing.
I think this is a problem we all have faced during the extraordinary turmoil of the last nearly three years. What are you doing to try and right your creative ship? Or have you maintained your course through the troubled waters? Tell me what you think!