She’s making me dizzy. Were I to anthropomorphize a bumblebee, I would attribute to it the characteristics of my daughter. Some children flit. My daughter does not flit. She dive-bombs life. She whirls from one thing to another. She is frenzied. She is motion incarnate. She makes me tired and energized all at the same time.

That is what I look like, I think, to many people around me. Frantic, unceasing movement from one thing to the next, not stopping until my body proclaims enough is enough and I have no choice but to collapse into my newly-warm bed and eat grossly insane amounts of chocolate chips cookies with huge glasses of milk and read really bad, really cheesy Christian novels for at least a week at a time. (I highly recommend heated mattress covers. I may never get out of bed again. Cookies or no cookies.) The thing is, I don’t feel that this is true about me. I generally feel, for lack of a better, more writerly phrase, balanced in my life. Balanced. It just says it best–the scales teeter back and forth from time to time, but they most often return to center. Center. Another “best” word. There is a peace that passes understanding just as real as the mysterious force of nature, the name of which remains back in my junior high memory unwilling to be recalled, which causes things of equal mass to balance on a scale. Generally, there is peace in my life. Generally, there is balance.

Then there was this week. A few too many commitments and too few opportunities to empty my brain out “onto paper,” and the scale is swinging. I feel it acutely. And it all centers around this. The need to write. The need to process. The need to create. The need to BE. When I don’t get it, nothing is right in the world. I am, of course, being overly dramatic, but that is also part of what happens when life is out of balance. Things that are not life and death suddenly feel like oxygen and water. And so, gasping for air, I pull out the oxygen tent that is my keyboard, and I breathe deeply.

Equilibrium. It can be recalled, after all.

overload writing