Miss Cranky Pants
And How I Solved It
Now here’s something interesting. I spent last month writing my behind off to the tune of approximately 52,000 words for the November NaNoWriMo writing event. You don’t win anything but can call yourself a winner. Though, even if you participated that’s a good thing because you are sensing what is in store for you with a long block of time spent writing. It takes some getting used to learning how to do the butt plant and write something that makes sense or is even remotely interesting every single day.
Anyway, I always operate in high gear. There are always a few days during the month when I say, “I can’t do it anymore!” and I go watch something on YouTube or a movie on Netflix or Amazon Prime.
So, yeah, I’ve been through that. In fact, this time I’m writing into December with a view toward bumping up the page count and beginning the finishing off processes. I thought I would be okay.
At first, I felt chills like I was coming down with a cold. My wrists and back and neck were okay, so I did not think I was feeling much of a physical reaction to all the writing. In fact, every day it was just a bit more than I did on any other day of writing. It should not have been hard. It wasn’t.
What was puzzling yesterday were all the accidents I started to have. Not in your pants accidents, just I jerked while I was making myself coffee and ground coffee went all over the place.
Got me mad, that did. Mad at myself and mad at the mess I now had to clean up. Then, while I was cleaning that up, I discovered the whole counter needed a deep cleaning and that got me mad. Then the tea towel the coffee maker sat on was gross and that got me mad. Then, I got my sock wet. I mean, come on, and that bothered you? Yeah, it did. I was behaving like a two-year-old all set to wind up onto an ear-splitting tantrum.
My husband hid.
So, the day progressed with me stomping around the house saying one bad word after another. I knew as I was doing it that it was really childish behavior. I just figured it was all part of the decompressing after the full on writing I’d done in November.
So, I got to writing about it in my journal and it dawned on me I was having a temper tantrum because I didn’t want to do our bookkeeping for the whole of 2023. I have to print out the statements, fire up Quickbooks, put in the opening balances and get to actually working on the year’s financial activity. It’s probably going to take me most of the month to do it, but it always is depressing. I always get upset because of the outflow of money and not so much of it coming in anymore. The important thing is that I realized why I was being such a cranky pants.
Immediately, I was back to my normally cheerful and upbeat self. I called my husband at work and announced that I was over my bad mood. That’s when he told me he knew something was going on with me, but he didn’t want to say anything for fear of getting his head snapped off.
Smart man.
But this was a form of focusing, a technique invented back in the day by Eugene Gendlin. I’ll put a link to his site below. His theory was that you ask yourself what is going on. You lie on your bed, relaxed and in a semi sort of meditative state. Ask yourself what is wrong, and you wait patiently for an answer. The answer should come floating into your consciousness and voila, happy ending.
In my case, I was writing, and it was through the compelling state of writing that the answer came to me like a blast out of nowhere. I wasn’t thinking about the evil bookkeeping upon me, though I was aware that I’d made all sorts of promises throughout the course of the year to myself that I would set upon our bank statements and get the job done.
So, here I am today, still writing, but I also put a good 2 hours of prep work into the bookkeeping project. It will be the end of January before I am ready to hand it all off to our tax lady, but at least I will have done my part and I’m not cranky anymore.
The Links The International Focusing Institute — What Is Focusing? Focusing (the book) by Eugene Gendlin — Link at Amazon, though you could get it pretty much anywhere else.