The Doing

If you had told me ten years ago that I would one day thrive on routine, I would have laughed. A decade ago Summer loved spontaneity and thrived on change. A decade later Summer craves structure in every part of her life.

This summer has turned out to be completely different than I'd expected. Even in May I had grand expectations of easy closing on the house, unpacking in a week and having a whole month before my dear friend arrived for his visit. A month of nesting, acclimating to home ownership, and most importantly, writing.

Suffice to say, none of that happened. Oh, I unpacked alright. Thank goodness for that impending arrival, too--it lit a fire under my ass like nothing else. I knew he couldn't care less what my house looked like, but I sure as hell did.

Now I'm unpacked and clean, my friend is leaving in the morning, and I'm looking at the calendar realizing that my days are rapidly spiraling towards their new beginning. When I start nursing school on August 16th, it will have been 2 years to the day since I got hurt at work. Two years of learning how to be a "housewife," how to be alone for 85% of the day, how to be my own best friend--and how to write like a full time author.

I went through stages of hating it. The first year was the worst, mostly because I was still so badly impeded by my injury, then surgery and post-surgery physical therapy, etc etc. Then things started improving. I began to enjoy my time at home, and I started taking advantage of all the time to write. Last year, I wrote 3 novels. I started blogging. I found some awesome online friends, and some of them have become in-person friends. I discovered that I could stay at home all the time and feel perfectly fulfilled.

And now nursing school is on the horizon. When I'm not in class, I'll either be working my new job or studying my ass off.

When will I write? How will my relationship evolve with this new change? Will my husband remember what it's like for me not to be the 100% home-keeper?

I've always been good at school. School, I can do. Textbooks, memorization, logging in the hours--that, I can handle.

It's the everything else that I'm afraid of. Since I've been at home, I've discovered a great well of writing discipline inside myself. I tapped it, and it still flows inside me, urging me to sit down at the keyboard and work. Writer. Revise. Anything. And the longer I've gone without it, the worse I'm feeling. Edgy, anxious, crabby on occasion. The novel always in the back of my head.

Yet I'm too structured to be able to devote the mental capacity to writing without having my home in order, without having my office setup the way I need it. And now I have company, which I wouldn't change for the world. As soon as my company leaves, I'll have 4 weeks left.

Four weeks to try to establish a new routine, only for that routine to disappear when school starts.

I'm nervous. I'm worried. I think obsessively about how things will be when school starts, how it will impact the life I've come to appreciate.

Nothing I can do it about it now, except start doing and stop thinking. Come Tuesday morning, I'm going to throw an entire summer's worth of work into my writing, just in case it's the last chance I get...