It’s been an interesting time in my head lately.

This morning I returned to my old standby, the Morning Pages, which I have been doing or the last six or so years, on and off. I don’t know why I leave off doing them, but I always do, and then I always come back to them, and the first page is always “Why do I stop writing the morning pages?” followed by, as it was this morning, a series of admonishments and punitive declarations about my lack of discipline and direction. (knock knock.)

But then I stopped. Not the writing, but the self-flagellation. Wondered (in writing) why it is that I think I have no discipline. How am I defining it? And I realized that by “discipline” I mean something very similar to mental boot camp, in which I repeatedly and forcefully beat myself up for not doing a good enough job at whatever it is I think I’m failing at (bang), threaten myself to do better or else (zoom), and make up a monumental list of commandments to follow henceforth (ka-pow!). I need to do X. I should make myself Z. If I don’t do Y, then I’m not really a D. And so on.

Setting myself up for failure, in other words.

(The previous sentence had a “more” in there but I took it out.)

I go through this every few months, it seems, and each time it’s like learning this one thing about me afresh. And there’s a part of me that’s all, “what is that about? why can’t you remember this one thing about yourself?” and, well, that would certainly illustrate my point, wouldn’t it.

But I think the reason I relearn this every few months is that it is an easy thing to forget, especially if I’m in a phase where I’m not being particularly productive — not a lot of writing or making things out of yarn.

This morning, writing it out, relearning it, sort of charged me up for the rest of the day. And not really in a good way. I felt on edge and staticky, as though anyone touching me would get the shock of a lifetime. The littlest things were setting me off, too.

“Is it ok if I…” “I WILL HAVE YOUR HEAD.”

It wasn’t until halfway through the day that I realized my mood was directly related to the writing I’d done. I stirred the pot and all the crap that had settled at the bottom was now bubbling at the surface.

As someone pointed out to me this afternoon, I’ve just been through two major life changes (“possibly three,” she said, in . . . awe? Let’s say “awe”), and that takes a while to process. And now just may be the time that things have settled, I have found the calm, and I can now take stock and start to move forward again.

So  . . . that’ll be interesting.

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