So what's new with you?

So here is what's new... You may or may not have noticed my last name before, and you may now notice it's gone back... back to my maiden name. My husband and a separated a few weeks ago and I moved out of our home to live with a housemate, so that has been a big life change for me. I will quickly mention that I am doing well, my now ex is doing okay, we communicate regularly and have accepted that we let each other down in many ways, and are trying to at least salvage a tentative friendship out of this whole mess (I actually think that we were never really friends and this may have been a contributing factor in our failing).

Needless to say my emotional state has been in turmoil for some time. Not just during these last few weeks of the separation but for a long time before as I felt our relationship deteriorating but didn't want to believe it.

Lying to myself I think I was. I think this has seeped into other areas of myself - my writing has definitely felt the imbalance in my life. For a long time now, months actually, well nearly a year, I have been blocked from working on my WIP. Suddenly I felt that I wasn't being true to the story and that my characters were fake and without true emotion.

I spent some time earlier in the year taking acting classes trying to uncover the block. I reasoned that the same part of myself that is invested in my written characters would be similar - if not the same part - that would bring a character to life. The being honest with yourself part, where you do not lie to yourself, or dupe yourself into believing something about yourself is true even though really, it is a lie. Scary bloody thing acting. It took some time but eventually I started becoming more true to myself, not caring how others may perceive me. I openly admitted my fear of being laughed at and being thought a fool of. My tendency to feel the need to make people laugh (so that they were not laughing AT me of course) started to fall away a little as I accepted who I was and started believing in what I was doing and forgetting that anyone was even there watching me, I was no longer trying to "act", it was real.

With these journey's of self discovery comes an opening of emotional flood gates, realisations that not all is well in your perfect world. Over the past few years every now and then I would be overcome with a feeling that things weren't going the way I thought they would, I would have a little meltdown, my husband would hug me and tell me everything would be okay, that things would get better, I believed him - he seemed so sure, I think either he did believe it, or he thought he had to believe it because the truth was so much harder to deal with.

But once those flood gates opened, I tried harder to get through to him. There was an ache in my chest and that sickening knot just under the surface, that black hole that whispered in the dark... something bad is coming.
Eventually the horrifying climax came, and I walked away. Actually I cried away, but you get the picture.
Now we both acknowledge the troubles we had. Of which there were many. We cannot go back from here, there is only moving forward. Who knows what may happen in the future - I don't like to rule anything out. I thought I would be with the man I married, so no, I don't rule anything out.

Once thing that has come out of this (there are many but here is one), is that my writing was in itself a sign of the imbalance in my heart. I couldn't free myself to feel. I couldn't lose myself in the characters and their lives and their hearts because they have to have real feeling and emotions, and if I couldn't be true to myself I was never going to be able to do that with my story. A part of myself is ingrained within every page, every word, every moment, every touch, kiss and confrontation - even the lies out of the characters mouths must be true reflections of themselves, and for this I need to know who I am.  If I am not being honest, my writing won't be either.

He is a good man, and will be always be apart of me, but now we have set each other free.

Since then I have been trying to pick up a pen and paper and write. Not a story, but more like a journal. The truth and nothing but the truth. I noticed at first I was mostly telling my life as a skimming the froth story, I was still not being honest about how I FELT and they are MY FEELINGS! Shouldn't I know? Shouldn't I be able to write them down? So I started to try to write what was really going on in my heart. Slowly, day by day, I feel more real. I write more real. I will keep writing about myself and my life, uncovering my heart and baring my soul, one day I will be able to get back to the stories I love so much.

I hope this today helps me too :)

Thanks as always for listening, hope you are all doing well and I've missed you!

P.s I was actually just going to put some nice quotes I'd heard recently in this post but look what happened! Pretty spectacular - I love writing :)