All right, it’s official: this round of ROW80 is definitely the one that isn’t. Kinda like Round 1. And my April CampNaNo attempt. And my PROJECT DISSERTATE OR DIE! attempt.

Don’t get me wrong; I haven’t been completely useless over the last few weeks. Instead, it’s been all about Life Stuff, random accidents, and other nonsense. Case in point:

1. I have been scratched up, tripped, bruised, and almost strangled by killer weeds.

No, seriously. This is a fraction of the years’ worth of weeds that my parents and I pulled up on our hillside over the last week and a half:

This is more or less what the hillside looked like before we started:

This is how things look after over 100 ice plants were planted:

However, the one good thing that the backyard has yielded are some lovely wild-growing calla lilies, which have made for pretty bouquets in the house:

 The moral of this story: Moving back home means that one gets implicated in all of the home improvement schemes that one’s parents decide to tackle on a whim. Brilliant.

2. I have had ALL the migraines and random accidents.

Really, I feel like… I dunno, the world?… is conspiring against me. My work momentum has been disrupted by days of allergies, days of migraines, days of random nausea, and (my favorite), the tumble down the stairs that I took last Tuesday, resulting in a bruised backside and the inability to sit/stand/walk/move properly. Seriously, it still hurts (wtf?).

Clearly, the only solution for this madness was the purchase of a new stuffed animal.

3. My weird anxiety and irrational fears are cropping back up again.

Losing momentum is difficult not only because it’s so darn hard to regain it, but because it creates a vacuum in which my anxieties and fears can breed. Getting my work done over the last few weeks has felt like an uphill battle, and while I have a sense that I have had some success (I am slowly adding words to the WIP; the framework of my dissertation is taking shape), it just doesn’t feel like enough.

It’s frustrating, and worrisome, and messes me up so darn badly, because things that should be really simple (sending emails, taking notes on an article, writing this check-in) end up feeling WAAAAAAAY more laborious than they should be. So the cycle deepens and gets worse; my lack of words and productivity continues to weigh me down; the weight of worry makes it even harder to get started; the morass grows.

So… yeah. My brain is a bit of a muddle at the moment, and getting back on track is proving to be more difficult than I anticipated. But, hey, it’s about taking things one day at a time, right?

I’ve been trying to write for 15-30 minutes each day on the WIP, because if I suspend the internal editor I can crank out roughly 500-700 words in a 15 minute session. And I am slowly dragging this dissertation proposal into shape; it’s just taking way longer than I anticipated as I am trying to learn this whole new area of study (organizational culture, whoo-hoo!) and ugh, there are way too many chapters and articles and such to wrap my brain around.

And don’t get me wrong–I have plenty of lovely things to be very happy and excited about. It’s just that when work + writing feel off-kilter, I feel like everything gets thrown off.

With that said, this week is all about trying, once again, to get back on track. I am going to finish the draft of this dissertation proposal, schedule a date to head to Santa Barbara to meet with my advisor, make all the research appointments I’ve been putting off for weeks, and maybe even take all the poetry fragments and bits of WIP ideas and pull them all together.

How’s everyone else doing? I’m slowly trying to get back into the rhythm of answering comments and blog-hopping, but know that I have been thinking about you all. <3 <3 <3