Flood

Last week, I encountered a small flood in my bedroom. 

It had started as a puddle that I'd noticed out of the corner of my eye over the previous frantic week, but every time I'd caught a glimpse, I'd hurried away and hoped that it would disappear on its own. 

Reader, mysterious puddles in bedrooms do not disappear - they turn into floods. 

It turns out that my hot water cylinder had been leaking slowly from the bottom, and because I hadn't tended to it in time, the steady drip had increased to the point where it could cover a large chunk of my bedroom in water. 

On Tuesday night, two of my neighbours and my landlords were in my house, crouched down by the cylinder and rapidly emptying takeaway containers full of water into my recycling bin, which had been repurposed as a bucket. The valve that was supposed to come to the rescue and turn off my water supply was no longer working, and was instead having the opposite effect of causing even more water to come out of the cylinder. 

Three hours, several buckets of dirty water, a heap of wet rags and half-a-dozen frustrating phone calls to plumbers later, we had the situation under enough control for all of us to be able to go to bed. 

The next morning, I awoke to the same level of water on the floor. The steady drip had refused to be contained by the assortment of sophisticated water collection devices we had placed under it (ice cream container, baking tray) and had once again escaped to cover three of the four corners of my bedroom. 

I emptied up what little water I could, sent a quick text to my landlords explaining the situation, and headed out to work, hoping for the best. The best was what I got: I came home to find the situation remedied. The plumber, electrician and carpenter had all been in to play their part in diagnosing the problem, and had installed a new hot water cylinder as the solution. My landlords came over to confirm that all was okay and that, seemingly, was the end of that.

*****

It's been a week now, but I still find myself mulling over the Mini Flood of 2023. All things considered, the situation was resolved quickly and with minimal disruption. Yes, it ate up my Tuesday night, but I had plenty of support and most of the cleanup on the next day occurred without me. My landlords were quick and efficient in getting the issue sorted, resulting in barely two days without hot water. 

And yet, I can't help but feel like this is another iteration of a lesson I have been failing to learn over and over recently, like a ditzier-than-most goldfish: don't wait until it becomes a flood. I had noticed the puddle. Yes, I was busy, but not so busy as to fail to notice an indoor puddle. But I had told myself that I didn't have time to deal with it just then, and that there were far more important things that I was doing with my time. Cue the flood. 

I could have saved myself a lot of wet-rag-wringing and frantic phone calling had I dealt with the problem sooner. I could have cleaned up the puddle, taken a couple of minutes to look closely at my hot water cylinder, and let my landlords know that there was a problem so that they could call a (non-emergency) plumber to come and take a look at it during daylight hours. Instead, convinced that my work trumped everything else, I barely gave the puddle a nervous glance as I returned to my laptop. 

I am a whole person is something I have been repeating over and over recently, trying to convince myself that it is true. But for all my muttering of this statement under my breath, I have yet to translate it into a sustained caring for my whole-people needs beyond work. Whole people have plumbing problems. Whole people need home-cooked meals. Whole people require exercise. All of these needs have remained untended to while I've attempted to tackle everything on my work to-do list, a futile endeavour if there ever were one. 

I have ignored the pleas of my family and friends, telling myself that they don't really understand what it's like and I'm the only one who knows what's best. I feel slapped by the arrogance of this statement as I type it. I don't want to be this person. I want to take on board wise counsel and maintain healthy boundaries. I want to cook actual meals and share them with friends - on weeknights. I want to go for a run as a way to relieve the stress of the day, and remember what it felt like to have my body feel fit and strong. I want to deal with puddles before they turn into floods. 

I know that things won't change overnight. It's only Day Two of the school holidays and I've already had to stop myself from checking email or writing down one more thing on my to-do list. Whole people don't evolve quickly from their half-person state. But with time, accountability and a lot of grace, I'm convinced that a whole person will emerge yet to write to you each morning. Watch this space. 

Kathryn Hahn

{via}

I have watched the trailer for "Tiny Beautiful Things" twice in the last week. There is a part of me that feels the need to apologise for such an indulgence, but most of me remains at a loss to explain what exactly has caused this slide into the sentimental mush I usually eschew. It's not simply that I love Kathryn Hahn and her steely gaze, or that I caught glimpses of verdant landscapes in the background of a few scenes. I think it's the fact that in the trailer, Kathryn Hahn as Cheryl Strayed looks as conflicted and distraught as I do right now. 

No-one is approaching me to write an advice column (for which you can breathe a sigh of thanks), but I shoot a version of Kathryn's look of consternation at the occasional person who suggests I may be doing a reasonable job of living. 

Me? I want to say. And again, me? 

My bookshelves are dusty and my bathroom is hosting mould I can't reach on my stepladder and I can't bring myself to tell my landlords that the oven has stopped working. These are only the external markers of an interior life that feels dusty, mould-infested and full of broken parts that need to be replaced. 

I spend days and nights thinking, worrying and dreaming about what it means to live a good life. 

I wrote a couple of weeks ago that I wanted to return to being a whole person. Reading was mentioned, so was writing. Dating, too. The past few weeks have included more reading, stilted attempts to speak French on the drive home and even a singularly bad date, none of which I have regretted. I have become slightly more adept at closing the work laptop lid envers huit heures and crawling into bed with a book and my journal. I can feel a former self reaching and returning to me, slowly showing me parts of who I have been. 

I am not worried about the past. It's the future that keeps me up at night. 

The other thing that strikes me about Kathryn/Cheryl is that although she is clearly tortured about her writing, she writes anyway. Her feelings of ineligibility and unsuitability don't stop her from persisting with her column, and this persistence (of the real-life Cheryl Strayed) has led to me unashamedly ordering a copy of Tiny Beautiful Things from my local independent bookstore. 

I can never disassociate Cheryl Strayed (and now, Kathryn Hahn) from the blistering essay, 'Write Like a Mother******" which appeared on The Rumpus over a decade ago. I re-read it tonight as I was thinking about this piece, and am struck anew by the two words she counsels Elissa Bassist to put on her imaginary chalkboard - 'humility' and 'surrender'. When it comes to humility, I think I possess it in relation to estimations about my writing abilities. I am not great and I am not terrible and I have reconciled myself to that. 

But I haven't gone any further to acknowledge the fact that, with mileage and exertion, I would like to become a great writer. And I haven't commenced the slow, steady work required to one day produce great writing. I have left my ambition and sense of calling towards writing unacknowledged, languishing inside my dusty, mould-infested, junk-filled self. 

*****

I have written several posts in the last year or so that run along the lines of "no more". I will make this happen! I've said. Writing is important to me! And yet, nothing.

My inchoate writing abilities haven't been coaxed into fullness by declarations. So I'm not making one.

What I have done is added "write for thirty minutes each day" to my rule of life. I have told my best friend, S, to check in with me about whether or not I've been writing each day. I'll be here, every morning, typing out words for the zero to twenty people who peer into this space. 

See you tomorrow. 

How I'm Feeling Right Now

I've got ten minutes before I need to leave for work. Ten minutes of crickets chirping in the still-dark morning to gather my thoughts and commit them to this page. 

The truth is, friends, I am tired. 

It has already been a long week and I am not yet halfway through it. I am finding obligations hard to keep up with outside of work, and within work, every time I feel like I start to enter a groove, I become aware of approximately one million things that I am not doing and should be considering. 

I know that I'm placing a lot of this pressure on myself because I want to serve my kids and my community well. I feel called to this work and have worked from the belief that the way to fulfil this calling is to sacrifice almost all of myself to it. 

But my weary eyes and limbs, my faint headaches and gnawing hunger from having forgotten to take my lunch (again) are telling another story. A truer story, perhaps?

I was on a course last week where the other teachers shared how important it was for them to be whole human beings with lives outside of work, lives they could then share with their kids. I nodded along, all the while planning what I was going to implement over the weekend. 

I can't do that anymore. I want to be a whole human being who sets aside time for the things she loves - reading, writing, cooking, running. I want to be courageously taking risks in more than just my career. I want my morning quiet time to become a non-negotiable again. I want to try dating. 

These things won't happen overnight, but just taking the time to spell them out in a raw, unedited fashion has made me feel better. 

In March, by the grace of God, I will be healthier.