Balancing Act

Life is one long first draft, but even though you don't get to go back and make changes, you get to learn a lot about how to do things right moving forward. -me

The ideas get better, the style gets polished. This doesn't just apply to writing but all the rest. Writing gives writers the secret pleasure of going back and correcting those flaws, not to make their characters perfect and the dialogue flawless-- we want flaws, but we also want that little magical power to inject a thoughtfulness that life doesn't often allow for. Even as a fantasy writer, a world of perfection is never the goal. It's boring in literature, boring in life.

However, experience is a magic wand we can use to transform a story, sometimes inspired by the big dumbs of our awkward unedited history of choices. Balancing a character is as precarious as it is in real life. We are the supposed experts of people that aren't us, even people we definitely don't want to be. We use a lot of tools to tune into each and every one of them-- character interviews, personifying them as if they exist, drawings, histories, back stories, side stories, upside down stories (say it in a Forrest Gump voice and add in a 'Lieutenant Dan' for good measure). Sometimes we end up knowing our characters far better than we know ourselves. (This isn't a character post, but I'm marking that for future consideration...)

I'll probably say it a million times-- life is a balance. That doesn't mean that everything levels out, but that striving to make it do so is where we find the ideal. It can apply broadly in how society works, socially with how we interact and personally on how we get our shit together. If you're old enough to get the analogy, it's like standing on a Pogo Ball. We all know it's semi-possible but putting into practice is dubious at best. For the younger crowd, it's basically a stretched rubber ball jammed into a plastic disk. To get it to work, you basically stepped on one side then jumped, grabbing the ball with your instep and repeatedly trying to jump and land without rebounding all over the place. Fun for kids, chaos for the rest of us. At some point, it became an amusement park ride that I strapped my dolls to with an elastic belt. Hey, not all ideas are winners but all winners have ideas. Losers do too. Tom Edison had to steal a lot of them to take credit for the light bulb.

Even for those of us that spread ourselves thin (or maybe especially for those that do), sometimes priorities are not always chosen wisely. I let my health slip. I don't have any good excuses-- my muse took hold on writing and drawing, my work took precedence; diet and exercise did not. Writers often joke about their love of coffee or their forgetfulness of other basic needs, but for me, that a serious offense. When I feed obsessions and damn the rest, the productivity eventually takes a hit when my muse gets lost in traffic and my energy levels tank. There's the need to catch up on missed sleep or just take a damn break and take better care of myself.

Okay, now that I'm here, let's keep putting my own choices on the chopping block.

I didn't make terrible choices, but I certainly didn't prioritize them well. Still, there's no point at all in beating yourself up or playing the 'shoulda, coulda, woulda' game. I got back on the horse-- I slam water like it's water (and visit the bathroom a lot more because of it), I got back into the habit of daily exercise and started taking time to prepare healthier foods in advance (because there is little way around the fact that fresh food needs attention). I could feel sorry for myself or lament the many months of progress that get set back when I slack off for a month or two or six, but it's not productive and the only fix is to be proactive. I can lament while I work to correct it, if at all. It's certainly okay to HAVE my feelings, but not get all IN my feelings and resort to destructive habits of instant gratification rather than trudging through the ones that will have reaching benefits. 

I won't say it isn't difficult. Like most of my female friends, I was an effortless picture of health (emphasis on 'picture' because we were all a hot mess of bad habits behind the curtain) until I hit those late 20s. A lot of the health risks were becoming realities and it was a wake-up call. I had started on a path where mental health became a priority, all the while being warned that physical health was just as important. Ignoring that, I damn near made my heart explode. Stage 2 hypertension happened and I knew that I found the farthest thing from balance.

That wariness we scoffed about in the older generations catches up. I wouldn't say I treated my body like a playground; I was always a cautious sort even when I did go for the big risks. However, it was clear that the struggle for balance gets a lot tougher than you realize when youth blessed you with a good metabolism or great mental health or both (and I hate you). I can curse gender biology but I learned a lot about how those factors played in to it. Born with bad circulation, pretty common in women. Then there's my genetic build, the fact that I do build muscle better than most women. However, I also put on padding like women have the tendency to do so those glorious muscles just make me look bulkier if the padding won't budge. Which, even when I was pounding out P90X3 daily for over a year, it hardly did. And diet when you're putting your body through that? Low calorie is where I increased the risk of injury so eating isn't something I could skimp on, but shy of supplementing, it just wasn't balancing the way I would have liked at it was too costly to even consider.

Top-level fitness isn't something that you can do in a half hour like the workout claimed. It takes a near obsession not just with what you do with your body but what you put into it and in that phase, I was getting wistful for the creative neglect that it demanded. I burnt out. It took 18 months, but I completely burned out. I can't say it was a bad thing though; hold up before you see that as an excuse. For at least 3-4 months following, there was absolutely no change in weight or energy. I absolutely needed that info about myself. This means that burn-outs aren't going to blimp me out right away. However, AFTER that, I put on about 20 pounds (where I am now) in a couple short months. I can get upset or I can look at the blessing that I got from it. I CAN take substantial breaks, although I'd probably only give myself two months at most rather than the four. My muscles, while holding up, aren't quite as strong as they were because walking just doesn't equal the demands of circuit training. I DID not end up anywhere close to square one, but I did let myself down anyway. Now I have the information I need to look for my balance.

Ideally, each day would be x amount of hours to drawing, writing, health concerns and housework, but no, it's not that neat. Life isn't, not for me. My muses aren't productive with schedules and even when I was on the super fitness kick, a scheduled morning workout sometimes became something I'd have to fit in before bedtime. I set alarms to remind me I can't put off eating no matter how involved I am in my work. Taking care of my fish has a funny schedule-- not at all complicated for me, but I've been doing it for years now (filters change every two months, plants soaked every two weeks, feed twice daily, three small water changes a week, clean hood whenever algae builds up, etc.). 

And hey, I raise my nephews. While I have taught them to be self-sufficient, I make it a point to check in on them, sometimes make them something to eat just to make time for conversation. I like when Dameon wakes up and comes right over to my room and wants to talk to me-- about Terraria or another game. Sometimes I don't play that game and have no idea what he's talking about, but I'll ask him a question to show I'm paying attention. Because getting frustrated and saying I'm too busy isn't acceptable. I already have a limited social life that I impose on myself to get personal aspirations done, so I make it a point to treasure when people choose me when the only effort I need to make is to reciprocate with attention and interest. It's never longer than 15 minutes because they are also cerebral kids that are looking to fill their brains and engage in introspection. I treasure all the weird things we come up with when we pop out of our rabbit holes.

I don't believe in a wasteful life. When I fell off balance, it wasn't about waste-- there is nothing in my characters that allows for complete waste. Recreation is rarely even an idle time, although my days of hard manual labor are clearly over (and certainly took their toll), critical thinking and constant mental challenges wear a person out just as well. I do like poking at casual tablet games, but sometimes the constant plugging away at my aspirations leave the need for mini-vacations. I haven't reached a place where I can blow money on vacations, so I take little trips-- walks around the neighborhood, bursting into my nephews' rooms like the KoolAid Man, casual gaming. However, my trade is writing and drawing, so gaming is often for the benefit of my muse. For creatives, idle time is very likely where we resource our work, but most of us don't like a whole lot of idle time either. Sometimes we drag ourselves unwillingly to a social event (the drag being the time away from our work for hours, not the people), only to come across someone's drunk cousin with the bad jokes and the ridiculous laugh and boom, he's GOT to be the inspiration for a side character I need for a scene that is becoming dull. Or maybe someone is wearing some cartoon shirt because 'it's laundry day' and it makes me want to incorporate it into my style.

Writing and drawing, I'm getting the hang of balancing that. Sometimes I write a lot and poke at drawing or the other way around. However, the both of them try to gobble up 10-14 hours of each day and that... is not cool. It is, but it isn't. Most days, I only need 5-6 hours sleep, so a 14 hour day with 6 hours sleep means cramming in all the rest into 4 hours. This means waaaay too many of the other things compete for that time. Even if I took it down to 10 hour days, are we still accounting for personal hygiene, bathroom breaks, eating-- you know, certain basics and courtesies that often invisibly account for where your day has gone.

I might have lost some of you on the personal tirade but I'll throw in a TL;DR: balance isn't ever going to be easier than standing on a Pogo Ball. You're going to have to do a lot of stupid things and look especially dumb doing it. You're probably even going to have to repeat a failed process just to find the places where a change could yield different results. It's only insanity or stupidity or whatever the latest version of that saying went unless you really do it exactly the same each time. While the relationship expert that married their high school sweetheart seems like the ideal you want to emulate, most of us are going to benefit from the relationship expert that royally screwed things up many times, doesn't have a clear type, and is a good mix of cynical and optimistic. Don't see your failed relationships with yourself as the measure of all that is to come. You'll meet and fall in love with the right you, but you have to be open to working towards that meeting.

Ha, I wish I had something far more interesting to account for my absence (I've always go jokes though), but no, I'm just kicking my ass into all that above stuff. UnSung's second part is about halfway through its draft. Yeah, that's about 40K in the past three weeks, nothing to sneeze at. I am finding little spots where I'm nudging around the first part too, so the hiatus on beta was definitely a good call. I guess I'll tie up the update with one of my in-betweener projects. Also known as what happens when a guy mentions he'd love to be one of your fairy girls, so the muse says 'we should do this.' I could have gone for a more comical approach, but I had a hankering to make a serious effort at a male steampunk fairy. For years, I drew nothing but 'girls' (hence being known for fairy girls) so guys could use some decent representation in Fae too. (Disclaimer: that was me being a clown, not a political remark. There's really nothing more agitating than creatives who sterilize all of their fantasy ideas with fucking agendas.)