I should've been in bed three hours ago

 

Sometimes it feels like every time things get hard, I just take off into someone else’s fictional world to escape. I wish I felt like escaping into my own fictional worlds the same way I disappear into other people's. It would be a lot easier to meet a word count goal for sure! But I guess it’s scary to pour yourself into something.

I know there’s still part of me that was hurt and damaged by the lady that ran that writing seminar that I went to the DragonCon before last. I wish I’d never done it. I kept saying that I was glad that I did it and that I learned a lot at the time. I really wanted to believe that. I spent a lot of time and money and effort on that whole thing. I didn’t want to admit that it was a mistake to go. I still hate thinking about it. It totally tore me up. It was ages before I wrote again and I’ve still barely written anything original, anything that wasn’t fan-fiction since then. She basically crushed every ounce of faith I had in my writing or storytelling ability. Not that I ever had much confidence in it, not really, but I had scraped together a little. Enough to start getting involved with workshops and writing groups again, only for her to basically say that my story… God, I don’t even know. I guess it doesn’t really matter and it doesn’t help to rehash it.

One of the chapters--I think it’s chapter 8--in the book “The Artist’s Way” is about healing from people and experiences like what happened at that workshop for me. And I did parts of it. I can’t remember if I did all of it. Part of me would like to try going through that book again, but it’s a big commitment for three months and I’m getting ready to start grad assuming I can get my shit together with the financial aid office. And working full-time plus doing two grad school classes seems like more than on my plate without adding in extra credit.

Still I’ll have to do something to try to get back some of what I lost.

On a totally unrelated subject, I’ve got this movie on in the background right now, I wasn’t really watching it--it’s just on--but I noticed that the main guy character in it is getting home so late that his son is already in bed. It’s reminding me of my days working in after school and how tragic I thought it was when the end of the day came and it was a babysitter that would pick the kids up from after school. As an adult, I know it was likely because it took them so long to battle traffic to get anywhere, but it still seemed rough. These kids who have been at school all day, since something like 7:30 in the morning who then spent four hours with me and my coworkers would get picked up by a babysitter just seemed kind of heartbreaking. I did have one kid’s dad would pick her up on Friday’s. Sometimes in a really fancy car like a Lamborghini or some shit to make it special. She always got incredibly excited about it, and I can’t blame her. It was probably unfair of me to judge them.