Terrible night leads to a new morning

Had a really terrible night. Couldn’t sleep and felt ill. Tossed and turned but I couldn’t quiet my mind. fosteronfilm was wonderful, though. He sat beside me, just holding me and stroking my head, trying to get me to relax enough to fall asleep. I love my hubby. Cuddled against him, I managed to doze a couple times, but nothing worth calling restful sleep.

Got out of bed this morning at 8AM and wrote for a couple hours. My wingstubs weren’t happy with me, but it helped to channel some of the mental gunk from last night.

Hobkin crawled up and fell asleep against me as I was writing. He was incredibly cute, making little sleeping roinking noises and twitching his little paws as he chased some dream cricket or pixie or whatever his small fuzzy brain stalks in Morpheus’ realm. With the ambiance of sleeping skunk to sooth me, my brain white-noised enough for me to think I might be able to sleep. So I curled up with him under my chin for an hour or so. As soon as I shut my eyes, my brain started hissing and snarling at me again and I couldn’t shut it up, but I did manage to fall into an exhausted nap for a while, enough of one to actually cycle into REM sleep. Had a dream. I can’t remember anything about it but the phrase “sometimes you win some, and sometimes you lose some.”

I feel better now, although still exhausted. There’s a certain clarity I managed to keep from the dream and that silly, trite little phrase. I can’t explain it, but it’s stabilized my perspective or realigned my sense of emotional balance or something. My subconscious gave me what I needed, apparently, to sort myself out.

I have my husband and I have my skunk. Everything else is gravy. I can choose how much of myself I invest in everything else–writing, working, other people, my aches and pains, my hopes and ambitions–but in the end, I can walk away from the world and its stresses if I need to, and it’s all good, because I have my loved ones to turn to, come what may.

So yeah, I’ve been under a lot of stress, and I’ve been spending a lot of time worrying about things I have limited control over. But as long as I don’t lose sight of the touchstones of my life, I’ll be just fine.

Writing Stuff

Uploaded the folktale to Critters queue. Added a bit in my author’s notes at the end explaining (I hope) that while it’s aimed at a younger audience, I’m not looking for feedback on age appropriateness.

New words: 1000
On a rambling, fragmented thing. More therapy than literary creation, but I might be able to shape it into a story. My mental turmoil and furious typing did manage to trigger quite a few interesting ideas. I only sketched the barest outlines of them in my outpourings, but I think enough to to remember and flesh out later.

Club 100 For Writers
39

500/day
44