Category: Confessions
Friday, May 9, 2025 | Art, Big Thoughts, Confessions, Job, Meditation, Peace, Source, Space, Spirit, Spring, Word of the Year, Work, Writing |
I am in another world, other reality, a different place in my mind, life, body. But where? I’ve disconnected from the version of writer I believe I was — before — before
— before I’d released my idea of what I’d need from writing, what I’d expect, what I’d value, what I’d receive from writing.
In truth, I need little from my writing; or — nothing? None of the things I thought I’d wanted.
This is my third spring working my job-job. I’ve approached it as a practice, as training, and as an antidote to my writing career’s boundary-less culture of under-compensated demands, spoken and unspoken, external and internalized. Before — I strived to meet those demands, spoken and unspoken; before — I tried to make a home for myself in a writing-adjacent career; bitterness ensued. And the bitter taste was justified, painful though that is to acknowledge; a person should not be required to work without security or for free just because she loves what she does. That’s not service, that’s exploitation.
I’ll still publish, and I still participate; but on terms that feel sustainable for me, and that grow rather than shrink my heart and capacity.
The job-job grows my heart, and my capacity.
The job-job offers me a clear role, agreed-upon terms and responsibilities, expected hours, and fair compensation. Also: security (as long as our school board doesn’t eliminate library staff … but that’s another story and in any case, it’s not the specifics that matters; the job-job is a practice, not an identity).
The job-job has trained me, continues to train me, for this mid-life, squashed and squeezed time that I’m occupying — this time of devotion. Devotion to tasks, to responsibilities, to community well-being, to small gestures of kindness. Devotion to the practice of gentleness. To the practice of seeing others, recognizing, easing the way for others to move more freely and joyfully and openly, appreciated and known. Devotion to the practice of invisible labour. It is this training that teaches me: I have enough, I am enough.
I tape and glue and clean and relabel. This is my training. I stand at the counter and listen, I respond with kind regard. All life deserves respect and dignity. This is my training.
I am the least interesting part of my writing life. The writing itself, whatever gift there is in it, flows through me. I am a channel.
I am content to be — A mirror — A kind ear — Invisible, or partially seen, or seen only in reflection.
I am content to write what I want to write and share stories and ask questions and to sit in silence. I am more than content, I am fulfilled beyond words to accept this mission of kind regard. What do I train for, if not this? This sense of being present. Able. Having the capacity to serve. Not to be in servitude to, but to serve.
Practicing. To be kind, secure; flowing, humming, through.
xo, Carrie
Saturday, May 3, 2025 | Art, Confessions, Current events, School, Sleep, Spirit, Word of the Year, Work, Writing |
“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river. It is a tiger that destroys me, but I am the tiger.” – Jorge Luis Borges
If time is the substance I am made of, I am depleted and drained and running on empty. If I am a river of time, I am cutting through unknown lands. There is little enough time in one life to defeat the tiger that pursues me, my own personal tiger being ambition and ego, and perhaps, too, the choices I’ve made or not made. I feel much like a stranger to myself, or a distant acquaintance. Is it too late? Too late for what exactly? I am the middle of a sandwich, pressed on either side by demands and responsibilities. Am I strong and calm and solid and grounded—a steady and steadying presence for those around me? Or am I squashed flat and distracted and grandstanding and weary and humourless?
Maybe it’s just a lot all at once, and I need to stand up for myself and turn down opportunities and be wise, for heavens sake, count my blessings, prioritize, ask for help before it’s too late.
Or is my timing off, is that all that’s happening, that youth has run on ahead of me, and I’m holding onto mores and values that strike a clashing tone?
Is it me? Why don’t I recognize myself anymore? Once upon a time, books were a medium that entertained and diverted and enlightened. It takes time to settle into a story, time to deepen understanding. Time to reflect. Who has the time? It’s not that I’m not reading, or you’re not reading; we’re all reading, constantly, we’re all absorbing narrative: texts and posts and blurbs and headlines and opinions and hot takes. Our brains are pinging with the reward of the new(s); our brains are bored silly, restless, over- and under- stimulated at once, chasing a sugary scroll on multiple screens that never fills us up. More, more, more.
I say that what I want is stillness, reflection, ease, breath.
But my choices make a liar of me. At night before bed, I compulsively scroll news headlines till exhaustion drags me under. There are several novels waiting on my nightstand, half-read, and every night I promise myself I’ll pick those up instead.
What brings me back to myself — the self that I long for and occasionally glimpse?
Physical activity, motion, putting things in order. I go to the gym to feel more like myself. I shelf-read at school. I hardly ever stop doing, except to collapse.
The hardness of time, its relentless turning. Gravity pulling me down. I need to be strong, I’d like to wise, but what if, what if, I’m not?
xo, Carrie
Friday, Jan 24, 2025 | Adventure, Art, Big Thoughts, Books, Confessions, Exercise, Friends, Fun, Girl Runner, Good News, Lists, Music, Organizing, Peace, Prizes, Publishing, Spirit, Success, The Candy Conspiracy, Weather, Winter, Word of the Year, Writing |
My to-do list for the next hour—
roast a pumpkin
write a blog post
Soooooo… the Canada Reads adventure is over for Girl Runner. It was truly lovely while it lasted. Here are the books that were chosen for the 2025 shortlist. Check them out!
I had advance warning that I wasn’t on the shortlist (call it reading the tea leaves; nobody reached out to inform me otherwise, but there were logical signs).
Ergo, my plan for “surviving” yesterday’s announcement (and I do say that tongue-in-cheek!), was to throw myself with gusto into my usual Thursday routine. I walk with a friend at 6AM, head to a pilates class at 7AM, spend the day at work in the library, come home for a bit of a nap and some laundry, then return to the gym for the evening with my daughter who is also a gym rat. We do weights, spin, and blissful slow flow yoga to finish it off, then come home to eat a late supper and completely unwind. I love this routine. It’s the only evening I spend at the gym, and the physical exertion helps me grind out my emotions about the week, empties my mind, and takes me deeper into my body, which connects me to the world. I feel very alive and purposeful on Thursdays. So I wasn’t worried about the residual effects of announcement, in all honesty.
And then. My day took a turn. Literally.
Midway through our walk, my friend and I dashed across a busy street to beat the traffic, and I stepped in a pothole, turned my ankle, and heard a series of snaps and pops. Having turned my ankle before (playing soccer), I knew exactly what was going down. The walk home was painful and longer than we would have liked, but my friend entertained me with conversation and it felt okay to keep moving and putting some weight on that foot. At home, in the front hall, I briefly debated continuing to pilates class, as planned, and then a voice of reason spoke (strangely enough, it was my own voice, out loud), and I said, “What would I tell a good friend in this situation?” And I replied, “Do not go to pilates. Take off your boots and take care of yourself.”
So that’s what I did.
To summarize, that is how I spent yesterday. I took care of myself.
I booked off work, made an appointment to get the ankle checked, dressed in comfortable clothing, elevated the leg, iced the ankle, surrounded myself with reading material, snuggled with the dog, drank tea, did not do a scrap of laundry, and rested. A day on which I’d strategized to distract myself from potentially painful feelings became a day of reflection. And it was good. It was needed, I think.
For years, when I “failed” to achieve some goal, particularly related to writing, I’d be overwhelmed with shame, expressed like this: I’ve disappointed everyone. I’ve disappointed my publisher, my editor, my agent, my family, my friends, basically everyone who cares about me. Yesterday, this thought rose up, in ghostly form. You’re a disappointment. You’ve disappointed people [in this instance, by not making the shortlist of Canada Reads].
“That’s interesting,” I replied (out loud! As if talking to a friend!). “Tell me, assuming that’s true, what could you have done to avoid disappointing them?”
After a pause, during which I scrolled backward in time through all the choices that were mine to make regarding this particular “failure,” I said, “Not write the book?”
How funny that sounded.
“Maybe,” my wise interlocutor self said, “maybe you’re the one who is disappointed, not everyone else?”
Hmmm… And in that moment, I gave myself permission to feel disappointed.
Ahh. That’s what it feels like. It feels different from shame. It’s sadness, a big sigh, letting go of what could have been (the imagined version, of course, which is never the same as what is).
“What are you disappointed about?” my wise questioner asked.
And out poured my feelings of loss: I thought it would have been really fun … to get to experience new things, meet new people, have some interesting conversations, make new connections … add a little zing of adventure and the unknown into my comfortable routine.
“Yes. That sounds disappointing. It’s okay to be disappointed …. Did you know that?”
Maybe, in fact, I didn’t know that. Maybe this has been a valuable revelation.
It’s disappointing, but it’s not the end of the world, or the end of my career as a writer, of the end of anything, except this potential experience.
Relief and ease poured through me. I read the opening chapters of On Freedom by Timothy Snyder, learning about the German words for body: Leib and Körper, and feeling seen and known. (As I understand it, in Snyder’s reading, a Leib is a body that is alive, limited by mortality, yet free to choose; a Körper is a body that is dead, or seen and treated as an object by others or even by the self; there’s so much more to these ideas and as soon as Kevin got home from work, I peppered him with observations, which I tend to call “revelations!” As in, “I’m having a revelation!” Which happens far too often for them to qualify as such, see above; but that’s how I reslish seeing things—as constantly changeable and unfolding and re-forming and illuminating.) Anyway… I also napped for awhile. My ankle ached and turned purple.
By evening, I was restless.
Today, I woke wanting my ankle fully healed. Revelation: healing doesn’t happen overnight.
Slow down, dear friend. Take it one step at a time. Literally.
xo, Carrie
PS If all goes as planned, the roasted pumpkin will be turned into a peanut stew by suppertime.
Friday, Jan 3, 2025 | Art, Big Thoughts, Chores, Confessions, Friends, Library, Lists, Word of the Year, Work, Writing |
Happy new year!
January 1, 2025 to do list
Yoga + meditation
journaling prompt + word of the year
walk with Nina
set up new laptop
I’ve been in a reflective, searching, yet celebratory mood. Starting on New Year’s Day, I’ve been doing Yoga with Adriene’s brand-new 7-day Prana series with Kevin before breakfast, after which we’re sitting in meditation for 10 minutes, focused on a short reading from Richard Wagamese’s Embers. After breakfast, I’ve been doing the Isolation Journals’ writing prompt (that one requires signing up and paying for Suleika Jaoud’s Substack newsletter, which I’ve been dipping in and out of for several years now). Such is the luxury of a full two weeks off!
I’ve been seeing friends, going to easier classes at the gym (yoga, pilates, and something called “total tone.”). For my 50th birthday, I gave myself a new laptop, which will make writing blog posts easier again (my old laptop, which I love dearly and have used for over a decade, has been struggling with updates, freezing, balking, lying down and refusing to get up again; it was time to stop asking her to climb mountains, or even to carry me on a flat path into town. I will put her out to pasture, with gratitude for all the books and art we made together).
I think that I’m struggling with writer’s block — that is my diagnosis. Oof. It makes me almost breathless to admit it out loud. It is a profound blockage and it is painful, manifesting in nausea, dread, anxiety that paralyzes my mind. I’ve tried shifting this block through a variety of means (including therapy). I’ve tried turning away from writing, declaring my writing-self toxic, comparing my relationship with writing to a dysfunctional or even an abusive relationship — all compelling and maybe necessary stories I’ve told myself. But not necessarily true or accurate. I’ve tried to bash my way through these blocks (they’re in the shape of books, by the way, unpublished manuscripts). I’ve tried ignoring them. I’ve tried re-envisioning my life without writing playing any part in it. None of this has shifted the dread. If anything, it seems to be intensifying, and my solution has been avoidance, an almost violent turning away.
Avoidance doesn’t work, you know it, I know it. If anything, it has amplifies, as the thing / sensation avoided seeps through the cracks into other parts of one’s life, or bubbles up in unpredictable and harmful ways.
So … and this is where all the reflecting and seeking comes in, I’d like to try something completely different. Something hopeful that does not ignore the problem, but names it — writer’s block — and also names the need to sit in the not-knowing. To sit in circle with what’s here, much of it beyond words.
In response to one of the Isolation Journals prompts, I wrote that I am afraid of becoming content, too content to want to create and make things; and that I want to be content. A circle that can’t be squared. On the first day of the new year, I chose my new word of the year, not long before my walk with Nina. I wrote down a few ideas — settle, free, ground … and then the word HUM arrived, without bidding or prior notice. HUM? I surrounded the word with associations, including “music” and “playful” and “hummingbird” and “energy around and within”. Nina gave me an association that popped into her mind: hum-drum. I found that ho-hum was there too. My initial response was, oh dear, not that! But I’ve been playing with hum-drum and ho-hum atop HUM, and I’m strangely, unexpectedly, contented by those words. Soothed.
Ho-hum is average, basic, dull; in my understanding of the state, so is contentment. Is that true?
When the kids were little, they would complain about being bored, and I’d wax on about “inner resources.” Find your inner resources, I’d tell them! I’ve been thinking about “glueing books back together,” which I often find myself despairing over, when bent to the task (it’s quite endless in the library — the glueing and taping and cleaning and shelving); a voice in my head says, this is my life? “Woe is me” thoughts. In these moments, I long for a bigger stage, for more authority, a bigger platform for my voice. And yet — what happens when I’m glueing books back together? My hands are busy and my mind is free to wander, daydream; the best kind of idleness. Off-line. Undistracted. Just me and my thoughts.
What if this work, menial and impossible ever to finish, is a gift? What if “glueing books back together” gives entry into a state that brings me into alignment with my inner life — nurturing and strengthening my inner resource through the practice of discipline, resistance to distraction, and attention to my own whirling, humming feelings and thoughts, sometimes uncomfortable, difficult to face.
Thoughts will come and thoughts will go. Flickers of dissatisfaction, of envy, and jealousy, yearning for a big stage and recognition; those thoughts grow in the garden of my mind, but in stillness and quiet, I know they aren’t me. My thoughts are not my reality. I don’t have to pick them up and carry them, or look through them at the world around me. I can observe their comings and goings as my hands do their tasks. And maybe in this ho-hum-ness, this hum-drum-ness, I’ll find a path back to peace with the not-knowing, again. Writing and revising require a person to exist in the not-knowing, to thrive there! Writer’s block is a state of intolerance for the not-knowing; a real terror arises. If I can practice being at peace with the not-knowing, maybe these books that I’ve written, that I love very much, won’t look like stones in my path, but like something else. Something I haven’t imagined or discovered yet.
xo, Carrie
Sunday, Dec 8, 2024 | Art, Confessions, Drawing, Friends, Manifest, Reading, Source, Space, Writing |
Day 8 Prompt
Draw an object from nature. Describe what it’s telling you?
Notes: This plant in my office, a succulent, reminds me of a plant at my brother and sister-in-law’s farmhouse, where I’ve gotten to go and write sometimes with my writing group. This plant reminds me of friendship and mutual support, and laughter, and how meaningful it feels to pause and breathe and listen to each other’s stories. Meaningful, too, to feel cared for and cherished and seen. I judge myself harshly and crave recognition (not all the time, but these temptations slip into my mind, these habits and patterns of thinking are hard to break). I long to be loved for my imperfect self and I long to be my best self as often as possible. Some days, this feels harder than others. But here is this plant. I’ve over-watered it and let it dry out way too much, and nevertheless it rewards my imperfect attention by continuing to exist. I am reassured by its presence on my desk.
xo, Carrie
Tuesday, Jul 16, 2024 | Confessions, Current events, Interviews, Peace, Play, Source, Space, Spirit, Summer, Writing |
Who were you, just over four years? Who were you, before the pandemic (those blank months/years of stasis we none of wish to recall and scarcely can)? This morning, I found some writing and drawing published on my blog from March 2020, immediately after we were sent home to wait out the pandemic. Immediately after everything stopped.
I had been running so hard, working so hard, treading water but barely. Coping, but worn thin.
And suddenly all of my responsibilities, save for the ones contained and held inside my house, were suspended. I was no longer a soccer coach. I was not leading a storytelling workshop. I wasn’t driving children to lessons and practices, nor was I going to the gym in the early morning to work out.
I was home with my family, cooking, baking, cleaning and disinfecting, mainlining the news, but also—I remember this—writing. Writing was my solace and comfort, my escape.
And reading over these reflections now, in my post-pandemic, post-artist life, I find a welcome rebuttal to my current strain of cynicism and doubt regarding the usefulness of writing. Personal passion project, I wrote of my devotion to fictional characters in my previous post here (just yesterday), as if in scorn. Without irony, this morning, I chose to pick up a pen and draw and write, in the lined pages of my notebook: “Now, I enter my listening era. I seem to have the lost the desire to watch fireflies in the back yard and make meaning of them—or to describe their pop of light, brief luminescence, in other terms. I watch them. My heart slows.”
In other words, I wrote about those fireflies.
Maybe I don’t always need writing (watching the fireflies last night, I didn’t think that I did), or maybe I won’t need it in every era of my life, but by God, writing has been a balm. Let me pledge to honour my impulse to write, when it arrives, which it will, which is does.
Here are some beautiful words I found in that post from March 21, 2020.
“The sound of my pen scratching—too fast, sloppily—across the page. I’ve only just noticed that I grip it as near to the tip, the nib, as is possible. I only just see it—my pen—as an instrument that I am playing, an extension of my body encircled by five tips of fingers and thumb, each with a half-moon circle of curved, opaque nail. There are no straight lines on my hand. The pen is straight and hard and useful to me, it is made for this task and nothing more; but I am made for bending, praying, curling, holding, I am made for giving way. I am made for praise. For contorting myself anew.
I am made for change and ever-change, evermore, now, as before.”
I am made for praise.
I am made for contorting myself anew.
I am not the same person that I was four years ago: I’d just won a major grant in support of writing Francie’s Got a Gun; I had confidence in my writing that seems to have diminished; I can recognize this change, but not fully explain it. I suspect that without the pandemic to interrupt my whirlwind of activities, I would have rolled onward. It would not have occurred to me to get a job in an elementary school.
I don’t want to lose touch with that self who wrote those words: I am made for praise.
Because we all are, aren’t we? And there are many ways to offer praise. Sitting in the near-dark watching the fireflies, just watching, sometimes that’s fully enough. And sometimes it’s not—and that’s when the impulse to write, to record, to transform, to imbue, to capture, to contort, to burnish, to imagine pushes its way to the surface and I pick up a pen, this instrument, and let my hand play music that seems to come directly from the universe; a universal impulse to make and re-make anew.
xo, Carrie
PS My career—such as it is!—is featured in a post today on Conrad Grebel University College’s website (where I lived during my first year as undergrad), one of 60 alumni featured in honour of Grebel’s 60th anniversary.
Page 1 of 3712345...102030...»Last » 
