Thursday 29 June 2017

The Middle Aged Freelancer's Life

My body hurts. I think it's all the sitting I've done in the last two and a half weeks; fourteen hours in a pharmacist's chair every day will do that to ya.

So I woke up this morning all bent over, unable to straighten up. Is it growing old or is it my body's way of saying, "Yo girlie! I need you to move around a little bit or else I'm locking up permanently."
Well, since I wasn't about to stay curled up in my bed forever, I got up, crawled/shuffled to the wall, struggled into my shoes and went for a walk.
It started out pretty awkward. I was walking like I'd been sodomized (excuse the crudeness) for a bit, struggling with every step. Then something happened and my body just...relaxed. And I was able to straighten up and walk like a human being.
My lower back still hurts LIKE A MOTHERFUCKER but I can move like a human being as opposed to a duck again.

It's a pain in the ass but I'm kind of glad that my body is built in such a way that it won't let me sit on my fat lazy ass too long without moving about and exercising a little. I don't know if it was because I was quite the sporty chick in my wasted youth or just everyone's built this way. Either way, I'm grateful.
The trials and tribulations of aging...so much fun.
Meanwhile, I still have a full workload to complete, books to market and apparently a whole group of literati to mentor.
I find it strange; some people have been coming to me lately to ask me about getting started as a writer; both in freelance writing and in novel writing.
I tell them all the same thing; you just have to do it. Just jump in there and DO IT.
And without exception I've been getting 'but I can't' responses. Like there's a magic formula or a bell that's going to ring to tell you that 'it's time; do it now.'
Okay, so newsflash? There isn't.
When I was in standard one, I had my first swimming lesson. The swimming coach told me to jump in the pool. No instructions, no nothing. Just...
"Jump in the pool."
Okay so it was the shallow end but I hadn't had a swimming lesson before that. I was expecting something along the lines of
"keep hold of the sidebar and kick your legs."
not,
"Jump in now."
Well, I took a deep breath and jumped. My heart also jumped. The water wasn't deep enough for me to sink, or even...you know, get completely submerged. But I was still terrified to jump. Still did it though. I guess it helped that I was an obedient little bugger at the time.
It didn't take me long to learn the basics after that, and pretty soon I was swimming lengths without effort.
What is the analogy here you say?
Well, it's simple really. You can wait and wait for instructions, you can hesitate at the edge of the pool, staring into the water, letting the ifs and buts stop you from getting in the water. Or you can jump in and sink or swim.
I understand fear. Okay, I understand the fear intellectually. My whole life has been about winging it and learning on the fly so I don't really understand the fear, but I get that people are fearful like that. But I have very little advice on how to overcome the fear of doing things.
Just do it.
What's the worst that could happen?
On a completely unrelated side note, I saw that Kendall and Kylie Jenner have superimposed their images on shirts of Tupac and Biggie and are now selling those shirts for $125....
I cannot tell you how...annoyed that makes me. Do whatever you want with Biggie, I don't really care, but putting your plastic asses over Tupac's face?....Man

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