True Confessions and an Absolution

The onset of winter, with the drab skies, rain, and housebound feelings

edge me toward depression. Which does not help my writing. For the past couple weeks, my memoirs have hung over me like a death rattle. There's been little joy in recounting what I lived through so long ago. Everything in me resists. 

I don't know how normal this is for a writer. Especially one so close to the end of her book. The finish line looms, yet there's so much I haven't disclosed about myself. The other side of me, the one who carries on beneath my convent experience, only surfaces now and then. 

This Who-that-I-am remains mostly a mystery to me. The more words I pile on in the chapters, the more my memoirs seem a simple rake-through the top layers of me, leaving the rest behind. Undiscovered. Unspoken.

I spend so much of my time being housekeeper, cook, errand-runner, and sometimes wish I could simply spend a week alone in the woods. Or in a cabin by the ocean, where I might wander barefoot along stormy beaches, letting the wind push me where it will. Where the pressure to write would be drowned out by the sound of crashing waves. Where I would write only when I wanted to. I would also give way to drawing, painting, doing Soul Collage, or would simply sit and stare absently into the sky.  

. 

Ouch! My Catholic guilt is alive and well. I still feel obliged to be productive and accountable for every moment of my life. I've felt the need to confess. Now for absolution--forgiving myself.