Life as one experience... and being unable to compartmentalise

I’m writing this on a train, riding backwards into the rising sun. I’ve not been on this site for an age, and am scribbling this into the mobile app. The right words at any time are really difficult to find, and often don’t drop into the right place at the right time.

There are annual cycles in my day job life where actions and their deadlines become compressed into tiny slices of time. When anything peripheral stays there but still calls for my attention. When 24 hours in a day just aren’t enough, when my mind and body crave just a little down time so they can actually function.

Throw into these periods of extremes the need to write, the need to create, the need to read, the need to at least appear as father, husband, brother, and friend. The easiest way to deal with all these needs or demands or cravings (perhaps that’s actually the most appropriate word, or perhaps not) would be to compartmentalise it all, to assign x seconds to this, y seconds to that, z seconds to the other, and xx minutes to the other other. To block out thoughts of any other task/activity and just focus on the one in hand.

I can’t do it. The lists in my day book (2 columns: work, personal) don’t actually reflect my mind. They are temporary organisation on paper. I can’t separate my thoughts into columns. I can’t separate the death & misery I see in my day job from the death, misery and torture in the world as a whole. I can’t separate the characters of my novels who run around in my skull from the questions I’m constantly asking of my life. I can’t stop thinking about my love for M and the children, nor my love of words, my love of language and languages, my love of music, my love of work (sad but true).

That’s why I’ve not been here, not written here, not read here. The world has been overwhelming me, Trump has been enraging me, workload has been gagging me, language learning has gripped me, poems have been shaping inside me, bursting out of me when I should be sleeping, the conflict between politics and the desire to write not about that has been ripping me apart, and my eyelids have been drooping at the most inappropriate times.

M said I shouldn’t feel compelled to write a poem every day. The children sometimes say I stress too much over needing to write any of the many novels in my head. My therapist reminds me to exercise self-compassion. A friend agrees with me when I say compartmentalising might actually make things worse, and treating everything as just one thing is best; no artificial separations. Readers ask me not to stop writing.

So. Here I am. Just imagine my living as one of those toddler paintings, where we thought adding all the colours together in the canvas would create the most glorious conflagration of light and colours, and the picture just came out as a splodge, a morass, of brown and grey.