Storytime with Rachel F Hundred

Finding peace in chaos.

Last weekend I realised that for the first time in a very long time I felt a sense of peace.

Not that my life is perfect but just that I feel like I am consciously back in the driving seat instead of being ruled by the whims of my physical body. It is a rare thing as a chronically ill person to really feel that sense of control because usually the illness makes control an unachievable goal. For a self-confessed control freak, it is a hard thing to accept.   

The thing is that what I have come to accept is that the control is an illusion. I’m never the one really in control because my body does set the rules. (Yes, I speak about my body as a third entity). If I am in the driving seat, I’ve had to stop for a rest, take a diversion, or deal with an unexpected traffic jam which means I just don’t get as far as I wanted on the journey. Just today I had a whole schedule of cleaning ahead of me only for my energy to signal it was fading before the whole list got done.

I think what is truly different is that I’ve accepted that reality of non-control. Rather than a hard plan with strict deadlines, I’ve created an agile board with all my projects, small and large, broken down into steps and arrayed across a timebox of three months, each month being a sprint. I’ve prioritised everything either as a ‘must’ which is something I really want to get done, a ‘should’ which I would like to do, and a ‘could’ which means it would be nice if I got to it.

Some days when I don’t have a lot of energy I might choose a ‘could’ which is small and manageable over a ‘must’ or a ‘should’ and that is OK. That is my life and I simply just have to accommodate that there are moments when I physically cannot do a thing; that sometimes it is going to take me longer than I had hoped and certainly planned for to get something complete.

The important thing is to keep progressing across the board. If I don’t get something done this week, it moves to next week. But I can also see the progress with all the completed cards neatly stacked up.

And my achievements this weekend are still myriad even I didn’t manage to do the whole house. Bed linen got changed, the house got vacuumed, the upstairs has been dusted, shopping has been put away, all the bathrooms got cleaned, and other smaller errands were ticked off the list.

It has been a productive weekend and I am celebrating what I managed.

I’m also celebrating that in amongst the accomplishments are writing tasks.

My original fiction focus has been the book cover for my first novel. I received the first proof at the end of the week and sent my feedback. It’s exciting. It makes getting the book published feel real again. I’m doing a final edit this week and next week I’ll be requesting advanced readers. I feel like that clip of The Office with the manager guy running around saying ‘Don’t panic! It’s happening, it’s happening!’ – we’re so close now.

I’ve made progress with fanfiction too. I’ve been stuck. I usually write in a sequential way, one chapter after the next, one scene after the next. It usually always works for me. But I think because I’ve been so stop-start with Another Dimension my brain is glitching on it. Stuck rewriting one chapter I decided just to skip ahead to another and come back to the one which feels murky despite all my plotting later. I am definitely celebrating the progress I’ve made which means I am a step closer to keeping to my ambition to have the story posted by the end of August.  

On the non-fiction front, I completed a Deconstruction which I’ll publish this coming week. Unsurprisingly it is a breakdown of the success of Spider-Man: Brand New Day. It is the first Deconstruction I have done in months and it feels good to get it back up and running. I won’t be posting every week which was the original plan, but I will be posting and that is progress. Similarly, I am managing to write these Writer’s Logs. I might be a day late in posting it up, but I am writing them, I am posting them and that is a win.

All this progress is satisfying. It gives me that feeling that I am in control. Ultimately though why I’ve found peace is in accepting that I’m not in control at all, but I have a structure now for helping me progress forward even in small ways, even in slow ways, but forward.

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