Trough

This morning I overheard one of the meteorologists in my office say, "We're just stuck in a trough that we can't seem to get out of." Talk about metaphors for my life. I have lately had the line from Bear Wants More running through my brain, "Oh what luck! I am stuck, stuck, stuck!" In terms of my writing, but it could apply to so many other things right now (my job, this summer, anything creative). I just feel like I want to peel off my skin and crawl away to a sunny rock. Maybe it's that other trough, the meteorological one, that's keeping me down, or maybe I have succumbed to a psychological low pressure system.


I have been feeling so frozen with respect to writing lately (in spite of, or perhaps because of, the class I'm taking), that I couldn't even put together a coherent sentence. Then, this morning, after being rudely and abruptly awoken by a mosquito buzzing in my year at 4 a.m., I got up and wrote (wee early hours are the only time I can get access our computer anyway, when C isn't working, my brother isn't Facebooking, and my children aren't demanding attention) and wrote and wrote and wrote. I finally got all of the stuff rattling around in my head for my workshop piece for class down in a first draft. I'm sure it's a (as Anne Lammott says) shitty first draft, but a first draft it is, and a huge breakthrough for me at this time and for this topic. Perhaps, just perhaps, I am rising up out of this trough.