Of what viscious stuff is Monday made?

I always thought that working for myself would dispel the ole' Sunday night blues and Monday morning dread song and dance. Alas, while it blurs it, and I have lots less anxiety staying up late on a Sunday night, the rest of the world still grinds to the routine of that schedule. And so there are no emails on Sunday and phone calls cannot be made until Monday.

Anyway, it is out of this foul Monday sludge that I have been thinking about life. Oh no, not in some sort of large treatise on life kind of way. I've been thinking about how, as a child, I was pretty sure that at some point in life you just arrived. Plop. You were there. There changed often for me. I always knew it included writing, but I foresaw all kinds of theres...I thought I'd have children earlier than my mother had me (she was just shy of 24 when I was born).--ha, what a laugh that was! I thought I'd have lots of Virginia Woolf-esque dreamy time to sit in my drawing room and gaze out into my imagination. I thought I'd run a cafe. I thought I'd be a college professor. A globe-trotting journalist. Eventually, around the time of my undergraduate degree, it became pretty clear to me that of all those somedays the only thing that remained consistent was the writing part and that all the rest of it was sundry, just trappings to make the writing part happen.

So I suppose if you didn't know me, you might say--aside from not yet having my novels published--that I have kind of arrived. I make a living freelance writing. I have my own radio show. I am asked to participate in local literary events. More than half of my friends are writers. I teach. (And of course there are about 600 more things that would make me feel I have arrived still...) But I am marveling at how this matrix of my life has been laid, stone by stone by stone. So many decisions and moments have gone into this mix. So many trials. It has been built very slowly, very steadily. Seeds planted a long time ago have come to fruition in surprising ways. It's a good and sturdy life, though it isn't perhaps as shiny and fabulous as the "there" I imagined in all its early incarnations.

And still, daily, I grapple with why I chose this path--one in which the soft guts of your self are regularly hung out to dry in front of an audience, in which people criticize and reject and regularly fail to get back to you. It's still not too late to become a CPA or a park ranger, right?

But I look at all the effort expended, the hundreds of blank books filled, the oodles of pages printed upon and I feel like to abandon all of that would be foolish, would be insulting to the force that provided me with it all.

So I keep on.