What to do when there is so much to be done and you don’t know where, or how, to begin?

Why, you just shut down and hope it will all go away. What, you mean you don’t do that? hmmm

I’ve been bad. I let things get on top of me and ended up in that dizzying blur of frantic activity that looks remarkably like just sitting on the sofa doing nothing. I confess, it may have just been sitting on the sofa doing nothing. No, I was doing something. I was drinking wine. I’m actually quite good at that.

I stopped trying to write as a I had his books (accounts) to get organised and then … well, I just couldn’t seem to get going again. Kept promising myself, get this done, get that done and can spend the time I need to move my people on. Course then we had Christmas and New Year. Not that they mean much to me but they raise another set of things that we are expected to do/go along with and I’ve always let duty override my deep desire to have nothing to do with the excesses of the modern festival.

Anyway the year is passing. No writing done on ski holiday. Desperately trying to fill in the gaps at work (2 bodies down and looks like they ain’t being replaced) and generally just too shitty by the time I get home to think straight. Too tired to write, too tired to exercise, the spiral runs and runs with brief bursts of progress showing themselves a false dawn as useful as recent attempts at Spring in Britain. Weekends are made up of periods of better sleep, hours of wakefulness and a cosseting hypnagogic trance state in which the words come easily but never quite spill out to my hands. I have forgotten so much that I should have expressed.

At work I have retreated into a general silence that people have read as a bad mood. While some of it is down to bad mood (let’s just not go down the route of my colleagues) they don’t really understanding the effort it takes just to go in in the morning. I speak to my users, I look after them and make them promises to see their problems resolved. I don’t mind doing the thinking for users. It’s what I’m there for, and if they could do my job I would be out of one so they can pretty much be as stupid as they want as far as I am concerned.

In six weeks I have another holiday coming up. An unexpected one. It may be a week of unwinding and getting my head in order. It may be a week of white knuckles and bitten back words. Whichever way I expect there will be wine. I hope there will also be words but the more that blank page stares back at me the harder I find it to put one letter after another.

So.

So, I will try (in bursts and twitches) to practice … to take a run up the foothills below my mountain of words and to see how it feels. Back to baby steps.

I want an end to excuses and to get back to being happier being me.