Time to Get Back to Work
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Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay
The Victorians had some rigid and bizarre rituals for mourning.
Widows had to embody mourning for at least 2 years, wearing nothing but black before being able to mute to gray, then mauve, and white.
But never mind the fashions, their absence at anything remotely social was ruthlessly expected. Anything less than total isolation was not acceptable.
That must have been torture, no matter how much the women loved their husbands.
Image by Anna Veronika from Pixabay
By the way, I’m not a recent widow and nobody close to me has died. My engagement ended this past summer when I left my fiancée. So perhaps this beginning hints of melodrama.
That said, modern times do not have adequate rituals for grieving, much less the elaborate ones nobody can afford through time or money.
Even if I had invested in a dream that would never come true – and would have been a nightmare if I had stayed, this breakup is the death of an imagined future. Even if I wasn’t happy, I was counting on this future, as you can see from this blog here, posted not even 5 months ago.
Oh! Bitter, bitter irony!
There is a grieving process in breakups that suspends sociability and productivity.
I was in a really bizarre space emotionally right after I left. I could only handle spending time with people I knew well.
Any time I was in a social situation that entailed mingling with others for the first time, I couldn’t connect with anybody. It was as if I existed just outside my body.
Image by Grae Dickason from Pixabay
But besides sociability, my writing momentum came to a screeching halt.
Before I left, I had been working with a very talented illustrator for a children’s fairy tale, “Why Roses Have Thorns.” See previous blogs about Natalya here and here.
She had just finished all the illustrations, and had set me up with an editor friend who was working on the manuscript.
I still need to go back and look over those edits to go for a final polish, because I haven’t done shit since the break up.
Needless to say, that second draft of “The Shepherd and the Courtesan” that I was so proud of? I’ve only touched it once since last July.
Thank Goddess that I had enough blogs scheduled for about a month because that kept me consistent.
Since then, many blogs in the last two months are excerpts from my novel and my work-in-progress, as well as journal entries from my DIY booktour/roadtrip in 2005-2006.
I even dug up a couple of blogs from a year ago and re-posted when I was truly desperate and couldn’t think of anything to write about.
I post 3x/week. So out of 3 months; that makes at least 36 blogs. Out of those 36, only 6 (including this one) are fresh pieces.
Image by Karolina Grabowska from Pixabay
This does not include the writing prompts. I’ve made 6 sets of 6 writing prompts since early September. I guess I went a little nuts on those because they don’t require my concentration, and that is the beauty of them.
I don’t need to stick to an overarching theme as I do a reflective article. I only have to put a pithy description or chunk of dialogue. Then whoever is grabbed by one prompt or the other runs with it, and comes up with their own themes.
Today is the 3-month mark of the day I left my fiancée. We were together almost 4 years. In the grand scheme of relationships, that’s not very long.
In the scheme of toxic relationships, which had we been the last 2 years we were together, I consider myself lucky that this only lasted 4 years. So many people stay much longer when they should have left much sooner.
That said, I’m still smarting over the lost time, even if I learned a lot and grew a lot.
A friend told me her measuring stick for processing the end of a relationship was 1 month for every year together and then it’s time to get back on track. She said it took her about a year to recover from the end of a 12-year relationship.
In about 22 days, I will hit that benchmark.
I can feel myself thawing out of the numbness that had consumed me until I went to a Tantra Festival (I’ll write about that later. I promise) at the end of August. Ideas are flowing and I’m getting restless.
Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay