What I Never Thought I Would Tell Myself About Inspiration

 

I am someone who deeply loves poetry and who is deeply embarrassed to love poetry. The nature of it is often woeful and self-indulgent, but at my best I have always been dancing with poetry, words, and ideas. One unidentifiable day, about three years ago, it stopped. It is hard to know when, precisely, because inspiration and emotion ebb and flow, but the last poem stumpling (a stanza or so that comes to me, to be used later) I saved on my iPhone’s notes section is dated 2013.

The effect it has had on my life is quiet and immense. It is as if you had been having a languid, lifelong, coffee-and-wine drenched conversation with God-your-creator and all of creation and then one day, it stopped. Radio silence. I received nothing, and for a long time, I said nothing.

In spite of it all, I started this blog. I felt overly self-concious of what I was writing and the inherent worth of it all. I knew I was missing something essential to my happiness, but I threw myself at the commonly prescribed remedies. I  exercised and went to bed early and counted my blessings. I redecorated (I am terrible at decorating). I floundered.

In the midst of my daily routine, the classes and chores, I felt an odd temptation to drop to the ground and lay, soft belly up, waiting for some angel’s touch to remind me who I was.

In April, I wrote my first poem– really any sort of creative thing– in a long time. It was almost as to end an out-of-body experience that had lasted several years. The feeling was immediate and very still.

God, or inspiration, or whatever you want to call it, still seldom calls on me. There was a time in my life when I could see a strange door and be taken away on a day-long engrossing story. Even if I knew it wasn’t a particularly good story, it was a joy to be taken.

I am trying to get back there.

xo,

Megan

Changing Course

You may have been wondering, if you’re a particularly dedicated reader, in what location is the summer series I said I would write? Well, you creepily dedicated reader, it’s not up and it’s not coming. Here’s why.

I GOT A JOB!!!!

If you read Funemployed, you’ll know I was struggling to come to terms with the vast openness of my summer at home after a long and fruitless job search. As in the past, I have been touched by the “Anderson luck.” Both my brother and I are particularly lucky– not just to have been born to the easy lives we have but frequently in big, act-of-God ways. So, it shouldn’t have been a surprise to me that one night while my family and I were dining at The Landing, we ran into Rachael– my brother’s girlfriend– and she told us that her uncle was looking for a receptionist at his law firm. Ding ding ding! Relatively short story shorter, here I sit from 8-5, Monday to Friday, raking in that sweet, sweet receptionist money. I like my office a lot. I  love working downtown, not only because I can eat lunch with my mom most days but also because I feel like I’m doing important work by bringing the average age of downtown Topeka employees down by at least five years. It is difficult work, rejuvenating the city, but someone has to do it.

My summer has gone from an expansive oasis to roughly eight weekends, which is part of the reason there will be no summer series. The other reason was that my ideas were not that good. I briefly became obsessed with organizing, I think partially to avoid my finals. It is very easy to organize a small room that you share. It is significantly more difficult to organize your childhood bedroom that has so much crap in it that the crap has formed geologic columns.

My other idea was for tiny found-object sculptures of the presidential candidates, which was foiled when most of them dropped out. One could also say that column would be “rude” or “not contributing in any significant way to American political discourse,” but I think I live my life in both of those ways, to an extent, already. Keeping with the title of this blog, I would have done it, but it is significantly less funny to kick people while they are down– which is why I won’t point out that in addition to not being the Republican nominee, Ted Cruz also looks like two pumps of my winter foundation.

I still have the tomatoes, by the way, and they are getting absolutely devoured by ants.

xoxo $$$,

Megan

If you want to read about the organizing kick I was on, go here.

If you want to read an interesting theory about the levels of argument (my sculptures would be level 1), go here.

P.S. The header image is the third image when you search “downtown topeka kansas” in Google under Creative Commons. The first picture is a highway overpass– literally just the overpass. The second picture is Kansas City.