Embracing The Lull

when you don't want to

There’s a pet store fish bag around my throat, if punctured, will release a cascade of coffee creamer tears into my cup. This day, I would not be opposed to drinking fighter fish for breakfast.

Enter: The Lull

The inevitable pause presenting at the most inopportune moment in a creative person’s life. The exhalation to the INspiration. I mean, you can’t just be over there inhaling all the time. You’ll likely apeshit a lung.

Great. Thanks. I still hate it, though.

Choosing to hate the lull doesn’t stop it getting at you.

The Lull

For some reason, October always finds me in one. I never have much to show for Octobers. Brewing things in cast iron pots on the wood burner, but the peacock feathers of summer have shoved off home.

Every time I sit down to write, there’s a chaos of baby mobile swirling around my head. Heavenly bodies, marbled surface colors waiting to be drawn into my pen for the inking. Wanting, desperate, to become stories. It’s too much. So I can never start.

On a quarter dose of my SSRI this week, everything strikes as overwhelm. Every corner of Saturn return threatens to poke through Dollar Store ziploc skin. My serotonin wave pools flailing in protest to the lifeguard lift on the ban; returning to source behind cinderblock synapses, now. My brain will have to settle for a French bath.

I wish I had more to say. The rest of life will lift soon, too. Always does. Just have to sit and wait it out. Dust off the old surfboard and see if my wetsuit still zips up over who I’m becoming.

Sometimes I wish I could disappear into the forest until I feel better. Until I am again fit for human consumption. People say I should only write about the good things, the happy things, the things that remind people of their superpowers. I’ve never been able to adhere to the unwritten joy law.

So maybe this isn’t the call to arms I’d rather be writing. But what if sitting in the lull IS a superpower? What if not flinching at the sight of the things you don’t want to see IS a skill?

Life can’t be one big inhale. We can’t just have lungs popping off all over the damn place. If you’re in a lull right now, too, struggling to be tender with the walking nerve of yourself, I need you to know you are not alone. You’re right where you need to be. And I’m in it with you.

The lulls are the blueberries being folded into cobbler batter. They’ll be sweet bursts, too, one day.

And we’ll be cobblered together better because of it.