Exhaustion

I am exhausted after a weekend of writing poetry and editing a children's story I wrote a year ago.  Last night I found the courage to dive right into the folder of crazy, melancholy, disturbed and terrifying poems I wrote as a young adult.  I edited and typed the ones I understood.  The others I put back in the folder for another day, or never. 

In my writing class, we have been tasked with reading aloud a piece of our choice, one for small group and one for the larger group.  I signed up for the class to have time away from home to write, but instead it is a reading class, which is much more difficult for me.  After a tough weekend of cleaning my desk and organizing my electronic documents, I am happy to say I have plenty of choices: a tall stack of poems, several children's stories (some of them hilarious, complete with illustrations), and a few more serious adult stories.  I have written more than enough poems to call myself a poet and enough wonderful stories to call myself a writer. 

I was shocked to find that the first blog I wrote was 140 pages long (over 31,000 words).  The blog was a daily log of me trying to cope as an unexpectedly single mom with a six year old, a baby, and a high-pressure full-time job.  The blog saved me emotionally and eventually became a wonderful subsitute for therapy.  As my co-workers fell off their chairs laughing about the tragedy of my life I had carefully turned into a comedy, I started to trust my voice as a writer.

I am exhausted tonight mentally and emotionally, but I am so proud of myself and cannot wait to see what I accomplish tomorrow.