Wow. It was really hard to start this post. Even now, I find my gaze wandering around the room as I type. My defense mechanism is doing everything it can to keep me from thinking too deeply about why I shouldn’t think too deeply.

Because if I think deeply, things might change, and that makes me afraid. I might get what I want, and that makes me feel guilty. I might fail, and then I’ve let everybody down. I might be imperfect–in front of everybody, no less–which is unacceptable. Every active step is another step toward upending other people, and this is unforgiveable. So I stay where I am.

Except, to stay where I am means I must distract myself, so I actually can’t stay still for more than a few minutes at a time. I must have plenty of projects going at once. That way when I finish one I can move right on to another, which leaves no time for ponderings that might lead me down another path. When I solve one problem, there’s another waiting. Thank God I’m doing such a good job with the distractions, because otherwise I’d have to admit that writing is my calling after all, and I’m really just scared.

And you know, this is all pretty silly, because it’s nothing I haven’t figured out before. The surprise is how strong the roots around my ankles are. Why has it come to a head now? Maybe because the roots have grown bigger than I realized, and they threaten to strangle me. It’s fear, all right. Fear of success, failure, change. Fear of meeting myself, of imperfection, but most of all, fear of emotion. Fear of losing control, of hurting someone or myself with those pesky emotions that seem to always be at odds with my surroundings. Why does it have to be so hard? I know what I want to feel, what I should feel, so why can’t I feel it?

I’ve been stuffing my emotions for so long now that I can’t comprehend what I’ve just written. Trying to edit the previous paragraphs would strip them of all meaning, if you can understand them in the first place. This is raw, just like the fear that I am only beginning to allow into the light, and this post might not be here tomorrow.

Last time I made an unexpected connection between the failures of the two huge artistic ventures in my life, singing and writing. (And yes, I do consider myself a failed writer at this point, but I hope to change that.) This realization brought other, smaller connections to light–things I’d already identified independently, but when interconnected make a sizeable web of self-sabotage.

For instance, many, many projects go unfinished. I become bored with them sometimes, but lots of times I’m tenacious and just can’t seem to get to the finish line. Little things outside of my control might go wrong or I can freeze up with indecision, but for any number of reasons I end up spinning my wheels. And I’m not talking only about writing. It’s a widespread problem encompassing home projects, marital issues, financial goals, etc.

This is the mechanism that caused me to stop trying to get published. It is confusion, fatigue and the inability to see the path, just like when I decided to stop singing. But it’s a completely different feeling from what keeps me from sitting down to writing at all.

Another stumbling block is trying to please everyone. I’m skilled at going into other people’s worlds, and terrible at bringing others into mine. Personally, I think this is what makes me a writer—because I’m able to go deeply and intuitively into the worlds I create—but it’s not so great for decisive action, nor for knowing what I really want.

Part of that pleasing everyone thing means I don’t take care of myself, like going to the doctor when I’m sick, or exercising and eating right. If it’s just for me, it doesn’t matter. Writing pleases me, when I let it, but it doesn’t matter to anyone else.

It got to a point where my identity had absorbed so much of other people that I didn’t have any of myself left. I’ve spent a few years trying to unravel that thread, and maybe I’m almost ready to start rebuilding. But something stops me short. Something keeps me from crossing that finish line—not just with writing, but with pretty much everything that would define me as an independent, productive human being. Now, is that fear of success, or fear of happiness?

I’ll explore that next time.

I feel like an asshole, knowing other people write in the face of greater pressures and still being unable somehow to overcome my piddly ones. But the one thing I’ve known the entire time is that it’s a mental block. The stress isn’t only an excuse, it’s a real reason. What I haven’t known is why stress shuts me down.

So the reason I’m finally writing about this is because I think I’ve placed another piece, possibly the most important piece, of my psychological puzzle.

Now, I’ve mentioned the fear of success in passing in previous reflections on writer’s block, but I’ve never taken it seriously. I mean, how douchey does fearing success sound? “I’m so good it scares me.” Right. But last night I was telling my kids how I didn’t apply myself in college, a typical parent’s warning to learn from my mistakes. All night the memory nagged me, the memory of what it felt like to choose to skip voice lessons that last semester, to avoid going to the piano practice rooms (and then when I got there to study history instead of playing scales), to be glad to excuse my slacking by pointing to my full-time job.

And it felt familiar. Well yeah, of course it’s familiar because I went through it, but it felt recently familiar. And then I made the connection. It’s the same thing I do today with writing. The same reluctance to begin. The same restlessness when I finally sit down to write. The same anxiety about what I should be doing as opposed to what I am doing, and it doesn’t seem to matter what those two things are. In fact, they switch places regularly.

Once I realized this connection I started to make others. I’ll go into those in the next post. This is a biggie. I hope I can see it through.

I feel pretty proud of myself for taking what I learned and applying it to change an old habit. For a long time I felt like such a slave to my unconscious (and detrimental) thinking patterns, so it’s nice to have gotten to the point where I can bring them out one at a time and deal with them. I guess this is what they mean when they say you become more of yourself in middle age. You start questioning the things others have drilled into you as fact, and you decide what you believe to be true.

And then, I suppose, most start drilling their own true facts into others, perpetuating the cycle. Is this something we are meant to do? I guess we’re not drilling so much as stating the truth as we know it. Maybe it’s human nature that the first 40 years or so we absorb our truths from other people, because we’re not experienced enough to trust our own truths.

I’ve reached a place where even though I might not be able to state my truth clearly, I recognize it when I see it. I recently saw the truth in a book about creativity called The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield. It is a small volume which tells me things I already knew but did not trust. I appreciate its compactness. Not a lot of jibber-jabber to fluff it up to an impressive size to the detriment of the message. I borrowed this from the library, but this one deserves a permanent place on my shelf. I’ll be putting it on my Amazon wish list.

So now I’m thinking a lot about what it means to be a creative person, how to not only accept that about myself but also how to celebrate it, and how to combine my creativity with my accumulated knowledge to let it manifest in my life.

Of course that’s not true, but I wish having a treadmill in the shed and not under my feet could help keep the weight down. Instead, I guess I have to admit my knitting has played a part. Rather than taking the place of another sedentary activity (can you say Facebook?), knitting has taken the place of other activities I might have to actually, you know, get up to do. Not that I had that many active habits in the first place, because everything I do is on my laptop, from writing to bill paying to photos to social connections.

So now, after much pondering over which laptop-centered activity has to go and what the hell would replace it, I’m thinking I need to get a decent treadmill and set up another walking desk. The only reason I stopped using the other one is that it was just too damned hard to push myself on that horrible manual treadmill and still keep my hands on the keyboard. I actually enjoyed the walking when I had something else to do, and it felt like the creativity flowed more evenly as well.

Another factor in my weight gain is my crappy eating. I cook more than I used to, but I don’t think my improvement is keeping up with my metabolism. Oh, and that reminds me, I probably need to get my thyroid medicine adjusted again. That might help. Another thing is anxiety, which I’m working on slowly to alleviate. Stress has been shown to increase belly fat, or so the diet pill commercials tell me.

I think I’ll go look around for a small electric treadmill at the pawn shops and thrift stores. If I can’t find a decent one there, I guess I’ll have to consider a new one, even though the thought of spending the money sends me into fits of anxiety.

And there goes another button.

I’ve been hosting this website on GoDaddy for a couple of years now. No complaints with them, neither price nor service. I’ve had the domain for longer—I think five years, total—and I used to redirect to my old wordpress.com site.

Well, I decided it was time to empty the old blog. I kept the url in case I ever need to go back, but all the content has been deleted as of this morning. There was no tangible reason to delete it. The content moved with me to this domain, so it’s not like I was embarrassed of it. It was just sitting there unviewed. But you know, a need to start fresh has simmering below the surface, evident in the ebb and flow of my new projects. Shedding the old blog was a symbol, I guess, of releasing old and tired ideas and habits, of mental clutter.

When I checked my email this morning, I got the confirmation that WordPress had deleted my content as requested, along with the domain expiration notification from GoDaddy. I have to make this decision every time the domain expires, but this time it is really tempting to let it go and just not have a blog or a website at all. The social networking sites have the capability to add any content I wish, free of charge and light on maintenance. I haven’t been posting here much, anyway, because all my ramblings have occurred on Facebook or Google+.

I don’t know. I have a lot to think about. I daydream about deleting my entire internet presence (as much as I can) and starting over.

I am ever so grateful my kids are older. A bit bewildered, also, to realize that I used to do that baby stuff with its constant attention every day for, like, 8 years or so. Obviously it’s different with someone else’s children, who are missing their mother and in a strange place with strange toys and strange napping places. And also there’s a rhythm to taking care of babies, a pattern of attention that a mom’s brain attains over time, which I have since lost.

But dang, no wonder I felt so frazzled all the time back then. And at the time, I didn’t appreciate just how much work it was. I should have made the husband do more. Oh, but I’m remembering now I tried and it didn’t work.

So anyway, take the constant need for attention of a 2-year-old and an almost-one-year-old, multiply that by 9 hours, add in the smelly detergent on their clothes, and that’s a recipe for a hangover.

But the bonus daughter agreed to start using the free and clear detergent again, so I’ll be able to have them to visit again, hopefully on a more regular basis. My kids love having their nephews around, and so do I.

So I looked at the oils I had on hand, and made the (foolhardy, for a beginner) decision to formulate my own soap recipe. I actually remembered to take pictures to document the process, and this is how it all went down.

I’ve been using Miller’s Homemade Soap Pages for all my information up to this point. It’s an old HTML website, but I think the owner still periodically updates it. Lots of good resources there, including a lye chart. Different oils take different amounts of lye for saponification, so you have to do a little math (See, daughter? Told you you’d need it. Do your homework.) to come up with the correct amount of lye according to your recipe.

I did the math, then found an automatic lye calculator on the soap guild site, which confirmed my numbers. (Okay, daughter, maybe you don’t need it. On the Internet, somebody else has always done it already.) Now that I found the calculator, I won’t be calculating the lye myself anymore.

One thing I have to work to overcome is the fear of wasting ingredients. I put off making this soap for several days because I was afraid to use the last of my shea butter in case I messed up the batch. I’m learning how to waste usefully, as in research and development, but it still gives me the willies.

On the previous batch, the oatmeal soap, I used a wooden spoon and stirred the old fashioned way. I hadn’t paid good attention to the temperatures and I ended up stirring for 40 minutes trying to get to trace (the indicator it’s ready to pour, about the consistency of thick cake batter) before I finally threw it in the molds and hoped for the best. This time I used my stick blender, and it got to trace so fast it was gloppy by the time I got it all scraped out of the pot into the mold. So the oatmeal was too thin and the shae butter was too thick. I’ll be able to tell where the middle is on the next batch.

I had to wait a month for the soaps to cure before I could use them. The week before they were ready, I sent a bar of each to the DarcKnyt and Falcon (So whaddya think, guys?) I found the oatmeal recipe to be sort of icky in its slipperiness, and it doesn’t lather well. It also smells verrrrry faintly of lard. The shae recipe of my own devising turned out much nicer, smelling quite neutral and lathering nicely. Gives me a little more confidence in my soap-making ability.

The irony? Soap and detergent bars like Dove just dry out my skin too much, so I’ve started using another technique to clean my face with a homemade coconut oil concoction.

I’ve been told I should write a tutorial on how to make a batch of soap. Not sure how much interest there is in my circle, but I might do that sometime in the future, when I’m a bit more experienced.

So this is my newest batch of soap. I hadn’t made any in a couple of years, and I was extremely nervous to try again, for some reason. I guess because there’s a lot of finesse involved, and finesse comes with practice. I had to relearn everything as I went along.

This soap is made from lard, coconut oil, and olive oil. I don’t use any kind of fragrances—obviously, because of my MCS—so any recipe I use will have to include oils that don’t stink to high heaven. Lard does (omg, does it ever) but the coconut mostly covers it up. Since it’s fresh it smells strongly of the ingredients, but after it cures for a month, the scent will be very mild, if present at all. So that’s good.

I think all my soaps will include coconut oil. It smells heavenly.

Oh, and I forgot to mention the oatmeal. That’s why it’s all speckled. The pictures aren’t quite capturing the color, but your browser will change it anyway.

I think I might stick with the all-vegetable soaps from now on. Vegetable oil doesn’t have that dead-cow smell that always makes me gag. Crisco is a good solid vegetable oil that’s relatively cheap and readily available. Pretty silly, huh? Crisco? Who’da thunk it.

And I guess that’s why I keep returning to this soap-making deal. It’s fascinating to me the ways I can combine common household items (drain opener, grease) to make another, superbly useful household item. It’s probably why I never got into art for art’s sake, because I can’t use it. If I decide I need art to hang somewhere, I’ll make that, but not because I have a burning desire to paint. I have a burning desire to craft useful things, like knitting needles, hats and soaps. Having MCS has been a curse in a lot of ways, but in this way it has been a blessing, because I’d never have looked for alternatives if I hadn’t been forced to, thereby opening up this whole new crafty world. I mean, I always liked to work with my hands, but it was mainly focused on woodworking, fixing things around the house, occasional sketching. I’m happy about this new chapter opening up before me.

And now I need to go plan my next batch of soap.

I pared down and organized the contents of my kitchen first, and then I actually took the stuff to the Salvation Army. Once I broke the ice, it became easy to let things go. I tackled the books, donating a large box to the library (all mine and the kids’—can’t get the hubs to sort his books), then the kids’ clothes and toys, including the ones in the shed.

And wow. The shed. My “shed” is huge, mmkay? People mistake it for a two-story house. It actually looks bigger from the outside, but still. That’s a lot of space to hold everything we decided we don’t need but don’t know what to do with. The guy that lived here before was a hoarder, and we inherited (long story) the shed portion of the hoard. O. M. G. It was packed. I tried to clean it a little at a time because I didn’t have a pickup or money, but finally gave up. I never did get all his stuff out. Especially irksome is an inline V-6 motor that’s immovable and constantly in the way. I’ve tried selling it on Craigslist and giving it away on Freecycle, and nobody wants this stupid thing.

But I digress.

Point is, I’ve been sorting stuff in there, too, and it feels good. A big problem in the shed is storage. There’s a ton of floor space but very little shelving, so everything ends up piled here and there. I’m dying to do a whole renovation to the place, maybe make a little apartment out there with a bathroom and everything.

First I have to rid myself of all those things.