Tuesday, September 23rd
Sep. 23rd, 2014 10:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinThe Daily Report
Yesterday, I unexpectedly started writing what started as another blog post and then turned into an essay and is now a sort of memoir. It stands at 10,000 words right now. I wasn't sure it would be anything more than personal catharsis when I started it, but the generally positive response people have had to my blog posts about processing loss, grief, and mortality leads me to believe that it might be worth publishing when finished.
It's hard to describe exactly what the shape of the thing is. I call it a self-help book, because I'm writing it to help my self. On a surface level, obviously, it's about the loss of my cat, but it's also about grief, loss, and regret more generally. It's a little bit just telling people about my life. It might be a mistake to try to describe it at all before it's finished, since it's an unexpected project coming out of a very unexpected event.
I don't intend to spend many days on this, as my personal goal for it is to work my way through the worst shock of it all and my artistic goal, when I'm able to think about such things, is to be more in the moment than reconstructing a historical record. If I find that I have more processing to do afterwards, either right afterwards or any point in the future, I'll do it... but this thing, this thing I'm writing now, is about now.
The State of the Me
Mornings are the worst. I'm so glad that I went into my spate of rearranging and redecorating over the weekend, so now I can walk into my office and not see anything that suggests that Dorian will come trotting around a corner or crawling out from one of his private spaces. I can walk straight across the room to my desk and sit down, and look out the window to see the world from the same angle he did.
It's painful to be reminded that he's gone. It's worse to be reminded of him in a way that lets me forget. Somehow, the combination of the two is more bearable.
Plans For Today
Today, I'm getting out of the house to help my mother-out-law set up a printer/scanner in her home office, a task that has been put off since before I went to Florida. Other than that and writing Tales of MU, I'm playing it by ear. There will be memoir-ializing and some unpacking and cleaning, I'm sure, but I'm not setting a schedule or making a plan.
Yesterday, I unexpectedly started writing what started as another blog post and then turned into an essay and is now a sort of memoir. It stands at 10,000 words right now. I wasn't sure it would be anything more than personal catharsis when I started it, but the generally positive response people have had to my blog posts about processing loss, grief, and mortality leads me to believe that it might be worth publishing when finished.
It's hard to describe exactly what the shape of the thing is. I call it a self-help book, because I'm writing it to help my self. On a surface level, obviously, it's about the loss of my cat, but it's also about grief, loss, and regret more generally. It's a little bit just telling people about my life. It might be a mistake to try to describe it at all before it's finished, since it's an unexpected project coming out of a very unexpected event.
I don't intend to spend many days on this, as my personal goal for it is to work my way through the worst shock of it all and my artistic goal, when I'm able to think about such things, is to be more in the moment than reconstructing a historical record. If I find that I have more processing to do afterwards, either right afterwards or any point in the future, I'll do it... but this thing, this thing I'm writing now, is about now.
The State of the Me
Mornings are the worst. I'm so glad that I went into my spate of rearranging and redecorating over the weekend, so now I can walk into my office and not see anything that suggests that Dorian will come trotting around a corner or crawling out from one of his private spaces. I can walk straight across the room to my desk and sit down, and look out the window to see the world from the same angle he did.
It's painful to be reminded that he's gone. It's worse to be reminded of him in a way that lets me forget. Somehow, the combination of the two is more bearable.
Plans For Today
Today, I'm getting out of the house to help my mother-out-law set up a printer/scanner in her home office, a task that has been put off since before I went to Florida. Other than that and writing Tales of MU, I'm playing it by ear. There will be memoir-ializing and some unpacking and cleaning, I'm sure, but I'm not setting a schedule or making a plan.