Designing your struggles

I've been suffering from a kind of malaise recently. I stay up late, often until dawn watching Korean Netflix programs ('Tail of the Nine-Tailed' is a recent favourite) or playing pointless games on my phone. I push myself going to work later and later, often on as little as one hour of sleep a night. In a strange, passive-aggressive way, I've been flogging myself and until yesterday, I couldn't figure out why.

I mean, I'm so privileged, right? My life is great. I have a wonderful part time job doing training and admin for a friend, and enough time to write when I'm not at work. My home is in the Dandenong ranges, a place I've always dreamed of living. I have fun, stimulating hobbies and an amazing group of friends of family. I'm healthy, financially ok, and even planning a trip to France next year, for pete's sake. What could possibly be wrong?

Part of me has been wondering if I'm as scared of success (in my writing) as I am of failure and it's causing me to drive with the proverbial brakes on. But I feel as if I'm tackling those particular demons with my process, this very blog.

Lacking any further insight, I polled my friends. One said I should just relax. Another, that she related to my aversion to sleep. She too had developed a similar problem after a relationship breakup. She'd work on her computer, stay up for 24 hours straight. She said she had to retrain herself, to make sure she was in bed by midnight, creating space and effort for rest. Great advice, I'll try to do that. However...

It was a third friend, one that has had more than her fair share of problems that said something that really rang true. That resonated within me like a bell in fact.

What she said was this, "I find myself in a space where I don't have to worry about how I'm going to pay my bills or keep a roof over my head. But there's part of me that looks at full time work and thinks I've still got years left in me. I don't even know if I'm up to it, if they'd have me but I want to contribute, to do something meaningful. I miss the struggle."

And there it was.

When I look back, even as a kid I had a ton of hobbies. Virtually every day was filled with after school activities; ballet, horse riding, drama classes, hockey practices, piano lessons.

I took the busyness into my adult life with me, worked a five-day work week, raised a family. I had my kids in all kinds of activities. There was little athletics where I was secretary of the parent committee, there was calisthenics where I helped with fund raising, horse riding where I worked in the canteen, and rugby, there was sooo much rugby!

I recall my mother visiting for my 40th birthday. I was rushing around, dropping kids off at practices, picking up catering, decorating the hall. She looked at me guiltily and remarked, "Oh my goodness, I taught you to live like this, didn't I?"

Yes, I'll admit my life was frenetic but if I'm honest, I liked it that way.

And now I'm in my mid-fifties. The kids are all grown and living their fledgling lives. I haven't worked full time in over two years and somehow I've learnt how to say no, or at least not put my hand up for every activity that requires a leadership team.

As the Buddhists say I've entered the land of tranquillity, the realm of peaceful light. It's beautiful and serene, yet in its own way it's a kind of hell. I've spent so much of my life rushing from activity to activity that in the absence of the busy there's this gaping hole, this sense of wrongness at my altered state.

I know I don't want to return to being that woman that ran like the Red Queen, as hard as she could just to keep up with life down the rabbit hole. But how do I deal with the emptiness? The feeling that something is as off as last year's Easter chocolate.

Over the last twenty-four hours I've come to the conclusion that struggle is not inherently bad. In fact, it motivates and inspires us. Human beings are innately problem solvers.

My grandfather's back yard was full of pieces of wood and projects in various states of completion. He had a friend who, when he retired, had a perfectly neat and finished back yard. All the projects were done. Guess who died first.

I've noticed that when things go well for people they become uneasy. They almost start to anticipate the next disaster. I don't want to do that either.

I've come to the conclusion that I have an opportunity here. The Chinese pictogram for luck is a combination of the pictograms for crisis and opportunity. I have luck, I am lucky enough to be in a position to design my own struggles.

I'm already doing it in a way, collecting research for a series of first and last blood stories for women. Working on novels, short stories...And now, after coaxing me onto the piano to play after what was literally years, that same wise friend who identified the struggle of the lack of struggle has charged me with writing down all the songs I composed in my youth.

I've made a resolution not to meander along rudderless but to grab my creativity and wrestle it with purpose. To strive, to express, to connect. This may require committing to again and again and again. It may involve falling down, failing, going two steps back, but I believe the struggle is worth it.