Tag Archives: self-portrait

A heavy mood has pervaded my holiday weekend and I can’t even figure out why, just sort of a malaise that comes to visit and won’t take a hint and leave.

As a result a lot of my weekend has been wasted on laziness, sometimes delightful laziness, but mostly just laying about doing nothing laziness.

This evening I felt a little less like warmed-over death and I ended up going to one of my writer’s groups. I hadn’t planned on attending, but my writer’s bloc right now is brutal. I sit down and nothing happens, the words are all stopped up inside somewhere and I don’t know how to make all of that stuff just burst forth. I suppose my real block right now is whether or not I should make it burst forth.

At group we talked a lot about life and the future and the world around us, and as will sometimes happen with writing groups, we talked very little about the actual craft of writing. For the most part that was okay, but something came up during group that really struck me, and moved me tremendously in my internal struggle. We talked a little about education and the point of education, what it does and doesn’t necessarily do for you. Right now I’m fighting with myself because I keep thinking that this education that I’ve struggled with the last couple of years really has no point to it. I’m doing another job to pay my bills that has nothing to do with my education or my interests. But I think in the end that is really okay, either that or I’ve gotten exceptionally good at fibbing to myself. My newest job has afforded me a sense of peace that was missing at previous jobs and with some of the conversation from tonight I’m beginning to think about my education and the way I feel about that as well.

I went back to school to pursue something that I love, right now it isn’t paying the bills, but this new job is allowing me more internal calm and more physical time to write, to help others with their work, to basically wallow in my own personal interests. Wallowing whether it pays or not. I guess that is the big thing that came for me from tonight’s conversations, my education is mine. If I make money from my interests, that is freaking great, but in the end my education is my own because I’m pursuing it for myself. The debts I owe, the money I pay out might not come back to me in a job or even the perfect job, but that doesn’t mean I have to stop as long as I’m able to take care of my personal business and my family.

For some reason this odd piece of information helps me. It puts things into place for me, it makes the idea of a future less tense, it just is another calm mile for me to walk.