Can’t Sleep?

20 - Jan 2022

3:30 am and I’m awake. I’ve been awake ages and my sniffing and throat clearing woke my hubbie (Yep got covid). He read the time off his clock. I honestly thought it would be nearing 4:30. That’s when his alarm goes off. Yes, he has one of those, ‘What time do you start work?’ jobs.

For many years he‘d rise that early and creep from the room leaving me snoring. Recently, since bereavement, stress, menopause and god knows what else - may be just getting older, I’ve not slept so well and whatever time I wake in the night, that’s it. I may be tired but I can’t get back to sleep. It is during those dark hours that unhelpful thoughts appear. They whizz around my mind like sparks in a forge fuelled by bellows.

The best remedy is to come downstairs, make myself a herbal tea and write.

Poetry

I got into a habit of writing poetry. I began a project where I challenged myself to write 300 poems. I didn’t give myself a time frame. Just went for it. I had a theory that if I numbered my first poem 300 and worked my way back to 1 that would make the task more manageable (I anticipated I would get a bit stuck along the way). That was over 2 years ago.

Journaling therapy

Before the poetry project I practised journaling. It was at a time when I had a lot of unanswered questions about my past. I found journaling a painful process at times but ultimately liberating. I can’t explain the power of asking yourself difficult questions. In a way it is like you are confronting yourself and demanding answers. If you’ve experienced that, you know what I’m on about.

I’ve started so I’ll finish

Another ‘dream’ of mine is to write a book. I’ve had an idea of a story, a particular tale, in mind for, gosh, perhaps 30 years. Not a fully formed plot or anything like that. More of a genre and vague direction. Although I tend to let plot and characters evolve as I write. I work intuitively. I’ve been in love with short stories all my life and for a time wrote and tried (not very hard it seems) to get them published. Story writing was another ‘project’ that fell by the wayside.

Blogging

Fast forward to the present moment. My passion for writing is being nurtured though writing my blog. If you’ve wondered about the randomness of my subject material then hopefully if you’ve read up to this point, by now you’ll have realised I have an amazingly (scatty) mind and you’ll perhaps understand why my blogs are fairly random.

Jigsaw

Life is a bit of a jigsaw, isn’t it? Lots of seemingly unconnected shapes that when arranged in a particular way, fit together to reveal the bigger picture. Well that’s how I see it. You can examine individual pieces and find them interesting or follow the journey of placing them down one by one until there comes a point when you step back and have a moment of clarity. Then it begins to makes sense.

So this is me. Trying to make sense of my life.

Piece by piece.