2010 April | Sleep is for the Weak

Writing Workshop: Gratitude

Posted by Josie on Apr 29, 2010 in Uncategorized | 17 comments

Welcome back to the Writing Workshop link-up! At the bottom of this post you’ll find the widget to post the link to your workshop posts.

I’ve chosen prompt number 5: Pick an emotion that best describes your state of mind right now…

I haven’t many words in me this week. The words that did come, didn’t come easy. They seem to have all hidden themselves away in the dusty corners of my brain. I think they’re having a rest, and that’s ok. Life seems to consist more of bright flashes of images right now so that is what you are getting.

I am tired this week. But underneath the dark circles and the slow sway of my day there has been a new feeling kindled these last few days, one stronger than some of the others I have been feeling lately.

It’s a good feeling.

It is gratitude.

So today I am being thankful.

Today I am thankful for best friends who are always there, who lure me with promises of wine and food and a night off from it all and who don’t take no for answer. And best friends who drop everything to bring me biscuits, company, understanding and gorgeous small people to brighten up my day (and who leave behind coats, you big twassack).

Thankful to whoever it was that suggested this game that happily killed an hour in the garden yesterday:

Thankful for special gifts from my lovely Secret Post Club match, Adventures of an English Mum, filled with yarn and chocolate and stationary and all my favourite things, AND goodies for Kai which made his day.

Thankful for supportive parents, and for a patient husband who brings me a cup of tea in the dark when I have had enough, and a boy who will happily spend an hour drawing coloured circles over and over, naming them with his nonsense words, as his mum sits watching her head on one side and smiles as she tries to figure him out.

Thankful for phone calls from old friends, and for thoughtful surprises from new friends that are already kindling a new hope and excitement about what this month might bring.

And VERY thankful to Linda, from havealovelytime.com, who is sending our family on a long weekend to review a beautiful spa resort by the sea.

We leave first thing in the morning. Four days of togetherness, and sea air, and good food and exploring the Pembrokeshire coast.

I think it could be just what the doctor ordered. Don’t you?

Here’s to a new month and a new start. See you next week friends x

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So now it’s your turn. What prompt did you choose?

1. What life path did you take a few steps down only to realise it wasn’t for you and come running back? Why did you decide not to continue?
- Inspired by Noble Savage who is at a cross-roads – “To infinity… and beyond!”

2. Tell me about a time when someone said something that made you feel good, that was just what you needed to hear.
- Inspired by the very foxy and lovely Chelle over at Chelle’s place

3. What gadget, object or invention do you find completely useless and impractical and think the world could do without.
- Inspired by Tiddlyompompom and her sample pot (and because her baby is SO nearly here – good luck!)

4. When did you say the wrong thing, and wish you could have eaten your words.
- Inspired by the Moiderer who wishes she had responded differently to her husband.

5. Pick an emotion that best represents your state of mind right now and write creatively on that theme.
- Inspired by my musings on blogging and emotional authenticity last week

Leave your name and the URL to your post in the MckLinky below (the URL should be to your post not just to your blog) and leave me a comment to let me know you’ve taken part. If you have the time it would be great if you could try and read and comment on at least two other entries. And be kind! It’s supposed to be a bit of fun – we’re not looking for the next Booker Prize winner here.

If you haven’t had chance to respond yet, then you’ve still got till Sunday to enter your link! Or just wait till next week, when there’ll be five brand new prompts to get you thinking.

This Writing Workshop is brought to you in association with Mama Kat’s Losin’ It – who’s lovely author came up with the concept and runs her own workshop over in the U.S.

The Gallery: Portrait

Posted by Josie on Apr 28, 2010 in Photography | 47 comments

Kai isn’t sleeping. Again. Can you tell?

After months and months of trying, slowly, patiently, lovingly to teach Kai that sleep isn’t something to be afraid of, and seemingly cracking it for a few short weeks, it seems we’re slipping back into the routine of tears, anxiety, and a body clock that inexplicably means hours and hours of fretful wakefulness and an inability to physically fall back to sleep.

I never, ever knew it was possible to have an insomniac for a child until I gave birth to one.

Starting a day on three or four hours sleep for me is becoming routine again. That grey fog that was so much a part of my life for months on end now settling back around my shoulders.

The long hours as I sit in the dark as Kai cries and begs for a hand to hold are blurring into one long half-dream. Vague thoughts of “no, you must fall asleep on your own. I am here, I am with you, I will not leave you. But you must go to sleep without me by you.” Watching the dull light of the numbers on the clock as they roll by. One hour. Two hours. Three. Listening to him toss and turn as he tries and tries. Calling out in fear to check someone is there.

Yes my darling, I am here. Always here.

I don’t know what changed. We have done nothing differently. As has always been the case there is no logic to his sleep problems. We are doing everything right.

I know it will better. All children sleep eventually. But it’s been nearly two years.

And I am tired.

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This post was written for Week 9 of Tara’s Gallery.

The theme this week was Portraits.

Writing Workshop #22 – Useless inventions and untrodden paths

Posted by Josie on Apr 26, 2010 in Writing, Writing Prompts | 4 comments

Morning. Welcome to your weekly workshop prompts. Thank you to everyone who’s brilliant posts inspired prompts this week. If it wasn’t for all your wonderfully varied blog topics every week, I’d never be able to come up with these, so thank you.

For any newbies to our weekly workshop (and it’s never to late to join in), here’s how it works: I’m going to give you 5 writing/blogging prompts. Pick one, pick two, or do them all if you’re really keen – it’s up to you. How you respond is your choice. You could share a real-life story, or make one up. You could write a poem or just free-write without thinking too hard and see what happens. It can be funny; it can be serious; it can be emotional. It can be whatever you want it to be. The only rule is to enjoy writing your post and get something out of the process.

Prompts each week take their inspiration from blogs, current affairs, daily life, or just whatever everyone happened to be talking about that week. If you’d like to suggest a prompt for a future workshop then send me an email or catch me on Twitter – I would love to hear your ideas.

So here they are:

2. Tell me about a time when someone said something that made you feel good, that was just what you needed to hear.
- Inspired by the very foxy and lovely Chelle over at Chelle’s place

4. When did you say the wrong thing, and wish you could have eaten your words.
- Inspired by the Moiderer who wishes she had responded differently to her husband.

5. Pick an emotion that best represents your state of mind right now and write creatively on that theme.
- Inspired by my musings on blogging and emotional authenticity last week.

Now here’s what you have to do. Write your post and publish it on your blog between now and THURSDAY. On Thursday come back and use the widget that will be up to paste in the URL of your post to share. Then take some time to read some of the other entries and leave some comment love! We’re not here to critique – just to have fun and support each other in our writing experiments. So be kind please.

Anyone who would like to submit something via email, or even anonymously will be more than welcome to do so. I’ll post them on the site here and include the link in Thursday’s round-up.

Feel free to use the Workshop badge on your blog or as part of your post if you like. Code is here:

Note: I’m told Blogger does something a bit funny with the code so you’ll need to copy and paste it and then retype the quotation marks (“) as Blogger changes them for some reason.

See you Thursday then!

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This Writing Workshop is brought to you in association with Mama Kat’s Losin’ It – who’s lovely author came up with the concept and runs her own workshop over in the U.S.

Blogging and Emotional Authenticity

Posted by Josie on Apr 23, 2010 in Uncategorized | 40 comments

Hello friends.

I tell you what, let’s start off with something calming to get you all nice and relaxed… how about this?

There. Don’t you feel better?

I decided that you could do with a bit of an emotional reprieve today.

Sally at Who’s The Mummy blogged yesterday about emotion in blogs. I loved her post because in it she acknowledged the powerful writing she reads in other people’s blogs and how moved she is by it, but at the same time she was honest in admitting she wasn’t that kind of blogger. I think we all agreed that didn’t matter. Her blog refects her, that’s all that matters.

This blog, however, definitely falls into the emotional category. It goes up and down as I do. It is over-analytical and wordy, just as I am.

I know it’s been a bit intense round here of late. That’s ok. It’s been a bit intense in my head to be honest so it’s only natural that this blog, this virtual extension of my brain (which is what it is) should get a bit heavy and serious too. I couldn’t have posted a lot of light hearted jokey posts lately as I’ve not been in a very light hearted jokey place. And this is an authentic blog, which reflects it’s writer, and I am proud of that.

So I’m not going to apologise for the serious stuff.

I am, however, going to acknowledge that it’s not always easy reading.

I am going to confess something to you. I have been a bit exhausted by emotion recently. Not just my own, but by other people’s too. Sometimes all these virtual voices seem to rise up in my head – so much pain and loss and sadness and grief and anguish. Ten times more what I go through, a hundred times more.

I want to engage with it, I am drawn to it, to offer my sympathies and respect for such beautiful, honest writing, and yet often I come away feeling drained, sometimes not even having the energy to say anything at all.

At times I’ve felt guilty for that. It felt like I was denying what they were going through somehow, ignoring them.

But it’s not, I’ve realised that. It’s just because I’m human.

We all have a limited capacity to empathise. It’s a good thing, a healthy thing. Sometimes we have to shut ourselves off from other people’s stories not because we don’t care, but because we need to protect ourselves a little. Maybe we are in a vulnerable place ourselves, maybe we just need a day off from pain and intensity, or maybe it’s just because genuinely we’re struggling to relate to what the writer is going through and any words we say would be a little empty, a little forced.

I have decided. I need my blogs to be authentic, but I need my readers to be authentic too. And I want to be an authentic reader.

If, at any point, something is shared that we as readers just can’t deal with on that day, I think we need to give each other permission to walk away. That’s the beautiful thing about this bloggosphere of ours, because for every reader that maybe isn’t in a place to offer something to a particular post, there WILL be others that are. What exhausts one person maybe exactly what someone else needs to hear.

I think acknowledging that not everyone is going to relate to everything all of the time, that every blog reader isn’t required to go through every up and down, that’s ok to step off for a while, takes the pressure of all of us.

It allows those writing emotional and very honest blogs not to feel pressured to change their content to make it easier reading if that’s not how they’re feeling. And it allows us as readers to be authentic in our responses, without guilt.

So there you have it.

I don’t expect you, as readers to comment on every post, go through every up and down. I give you permission to bunk off from time to time. Just the fact you stop by now and then is enough for me. It means that when you do it was because you really wanted to be here, that you were really listening, and that you were saying how you really felt.

And that is very special to me.

Thank you.

How about you? Do you find emotion in blogs exhausting at times? How do you deal with it? Do you step away if it gets to much? Do you feel guilty about that? I’d love to know...