With a Dream & my Cardigan

My responsibilities have diminished my creativity & productivity. But maybe, they've also saved me from myself.

Hello to all, I come to you this week from sunny California, or else more accurately mid-air somewhere between home and there. I’ve been writing on a project, while folding into my west coast crew during my evenings and it’s all gone swimmingly.

Considering how well-worn this journey is for me now, I was wrong-footed to find myself with a pounding heart, unable to put words together on the day of departure. I couldn’t really put my finger on why I was so anxious, but there is a lot going on around me—things which in isolation are only sapping the tiniest bit of vim, but in sum have exerted a heavier weight than I suppose I had perceived. This is the story, isn’t it? There’s no one big headline, it’s just this and that and that and this x 47 until you suddenly realise that all those little nicks have bled you dry.

I’m actually personally great. Work going well, great writing gigs, great confidence levels, giving less and less of a shit on the daily about the things that used to incarcerate my spirit, blah blah. But cracks are proliferating around me, things entirely out of my control yet for which I bear a charge of duty. My poor old dad has been in hospital in Munich and after a serious spinal operation is now back home. I’m navigating some choppy waters at school, things which I’m finding are pushing latent buttons and making me on high alert about my responses. We’re in a holding pattern with our house (and thus finances), there’s been a natural end with a long-term childminder and some unsettling shifts within marriages in my broader community which have triggered me. I am finding that I am taking things to heart at the moment, I just can’t get the water to run down the duck’s back, even when problems are patently not my business.

A case in point: two lovely women wanted to buy my wedding dress last weekend. This is obviously wonderful news. I’m thrilled to pass it on, and I have a specific, future-focused financial pot to put it in. I was very lucky to have two offers. But finding myself in a position where I had to decide which of them to sell it to paralysed me. The moral quagmire I created for myself, analysing x, evaluating y. Obviously, having just got married myself I was full to the brim with human empathy. It’s such an important moment and when you find the right fit, it’s not something easily replicated. I just didn’t want to let either of them down. Yet as a friend who counselled me said, this was a decision between two women who have found the loves of their lives and could afford an expensive wedding dress. Women who have lots of other options. It’s not life and death. Still, I dragged myself through the mill as if it were.

Upon reflection, I think I’m suffering from responsibility fatigue to the extent that I’m making every problem my problem. I reckon many women find themselves in this pit–trying to scoop up every concern and trying to control it to protect everyone around them. And there is something horrendously infectious about the anxiety which comes with it. I find when I’m in its midst, I spend more time online, more time on screens, more time finding more things to worry about in a bid to distract myself from the ones that are already dysregulating my internal balance. No wonder I was high as a kite at Gate C52.