IWSG: A Fresh Start

More information here.

After about three months of drama around finding a house, we're finally moving to a new place. In fact, I'm writing this on Monday because I know that I'll be about knee deep into packing, loading, and moving things by the time this post comes live.

Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but it's really feeling like this move will mostly bring to an end five years of chaos that I've had to cope with every day. To that end, I'm really excited to get moving, even if the amount of stuff that needs to be dealt with would have other people pulling out their hair.

But at the same time, this new start also involves a ton of processing of another sort. Emotional. If this move is to be the first day of the rest of my life, I have to cut some stuff out and leave it right here in this house. 

I've been so locked in survival/defense/fight/flight mode that it's become my go to. The thing is... it's exhausting. Except for hopeful, my other single-word emotional status is currently drained. So in a lot of ways, I haven't felt like myself for at least three years... which is also why my fiction-writing productivity took a massive hit. 

I'm not a person hoping for a certain set of perfect circumstances, but when negativity and the accompanying anxiety hits often and at random, making you lose any small amount of momentum you might have gained literally the day before... It's heartbreaking. 

So the fact that I managed to get Book 3 of War of Six Crowns to any stage of completion despite this is something for me to be proud of. 

But despite this and despite my growing success as a full-time writer... I'm feeling a growing sense of discontent. In a sense this is a good thing. I'm actually calm enough and able to not be at panic stations for long enough to allow me time to miss certain things I had left by the way-side to just allow me to get through. 

See, I've been cutting back to the bare minimum so that I could keep going while dragging such a huge amount of drama with me. But now I'm very much to offload the drama right here. Which should really leave a lot of space for other things. And right now, that space feels like a void. A void of writing where I took over two years to finish a rewrite and revision because I hadn't been able to write consecutively for more than two days in a row in over two years. A void of art because I never felt secure enough to actually commit to an art project. 

Here's the thing though, I've been so used to... not... fitting everything in that the thought of moving furniture around in my head is pretty daunting. It feels almost like too much of a challenge to work and write and focus on my health and do more art (other than writing) and read more and resume my French practice so I don't lose it again and be more active on social media and... and... and... 

But the thing is that I just have to find a way. My thinking is to spend maybe the rest of the month evaluating my life and everything I want to do, and then decide how I'm going to start bringing those things in. 

Do you also find it daunting to make things fit into your life? How do you approach it?