Once again, I cut it down to the wire to get a post out.
I was debating about counting my 'hey, doing the poetry marathon!' post as the 'one post per month' goal, but it very much does not count. It is, in fact, a handful of sentences, announcing that I am doing a poetry marathon.
I succeeded in the marathon - twenty-four poems over twenty-four hours. I then promptly crashed, hard, and still am not back to full functioning. It's... frustrating. My capacity to do things, my capacity to cope, is so varied - week to week and even day to day, I really have no way of predicting what I can and can't do, what I have space for and what I don't. Infuriating.
In terms of the marathon, all of my poems were based off of a theme, and I plan to edit all twenty-four poems into a little digital booklet available for purchase, probably on my itch.io? We'll see.
Beyond that, I also got my court date for SSDI, which is good news. I also am going to talk about getting a hysterectomy on November 27th... my birthday. It'll be the first meeting to get the ball rolling on that. And I've been... well, I've been mostly keeping up with my own poem per day, even over the poetry marathon. In a lot of cases, it's not hard or time consuming for me to write poetry. I mean, certain poems... iambic pentameter, my beloathed... but a lot of it comes down to needing energy and inspiration more than anything else.
When I edit my poems, I often make changes to them, but it can also be hard to edit poems. The change of a word or of a punctuation mark can completely change the feeling of a poem. With prose, deciding on a period or a comma makes the difference between a run-on sentence or a short one; when it comes to poetry, the same decision can change the poem from a hopeful tone to a negative one. When I've had other people edit my poems, I have often wondered what the heck they are thinking when they say I should make certain changes, because those changes would completely demolish the meaning.
...Not every time, of course. I've had edits too that have been very beneficial, and that's been nice.
The key thing in being an editor for Other People's work, I think, is knowing when an edit helps clarify things and would be beneficial versus when you're rewriting someone else's work entirely. I've had the latter happen with prose, where someone went and rewrote every. single. sentence, taking out my own unique voice and making me completely rewrite an entire story. (Needless to say, I dropped that beta reader very quickly.
)Anyway.
I've been trying to have topics on these posts, and obviously those have leaned in a heavier direction. It's hard not to be heavy when my life is so much defined by who and what I am, and that happens to be a queer, disabled writer. I think a lot.
But this is what happens when I come without a topic, just a need to write - I jump from place to place, and end up getting nowhere.
Anyway, this is just a short update. I don't have a lot of energy; I feel very drained and I've been dealing with a lot of pain. I've been struggling to keep up with laundry and the litter boxes, which is usually a sign that I'm maybe not doing great since laundry doesn't take a lot of spoons and I prioritize caring for my cats. But it helps me to achieve my goals and have something to show for whatever it is I'm doing. Like the other day, I cleaned my bathroom, and I felt very good about that.
Self-care is a balancing act of cleaning the bathroom followed by taking a soothing bath. Both of those are acts of self-care. I kind of love that fact.