Today seems like the perfect kind of day to tell you all about how I keep my mind in perfect (hah!) working (ahahah!) order. Stop laughing, I'm serious.
Semi-serious. I've had more experience than was probably wise at attempting to work through a turbo-charged, somewhat manic state -- somewhat manic both in the clinical sense of manic and in the colloquial, and more the latter than the former. And the fact that I have a coping mechanism for working through or coming down from a manic state of project-tackling is at least half-due to general practice at meditative techniques. I was raised by hippies, what can I say? They teach you this when you're young and raised by hippies.
So, my mental landscape is pretty well defined. It started when I was around twelve, thirteen or so, sprung out of recurring dreams and conversations with friends and far too many fantasy novels. It solidified into something resembling consistent form when I became involved in online text-based roleplay, which, since it was freeform, meant I had to consistently describe things like what my headspace was and who lived in it. The basement muse is a subject for another time entirely, but I did manage to get some sort of concrete idea of what it looked like inside the place where I went to plan things.
My headspace is vast and contains multitudes. The center of it is a tower, because little girls who dream of being fantasy heroes love towers, and Very Important People have them (just ask Neil Gaiman). At the ground level there are gardens and fields and hot springs and a big stone wall, but at the top of it is my private little headspace bedroom, and beneath that is the Workshop.
For those of you who haven't read Meredith Ann Pierce's Darkangel Trilogy, it's a young adult series in which a girl is given a spindle which spins, not wool, but thoughts and feelings. And when she's upset it spins an itchy, coarse thread, and when she's content it spins like fine silk. This also comes out, albeit less blatantly magical, when the protagonist of Wise Child (by Monica Furlong) is learning to spin and weave. And in addition to the hippies I grew up spending summers in the Appalachian mountains with my aunts and uncles, and they taught me all kinds of things like how to weave and knit, how to throw clay, how to sew, about feeding chickens and cows and riding horses, how to make baskets, how to spin and make yarn, how to take plain white or off-white things and put color onto them, and the idea that physically creating something tied into one's emotions flew into the blender with all of this and spattered all over my consciousness. The upshot of all this, I was surrounded by crafty people and books about how being crafty could be magical if you thought about it right, so of course my headspace would be full of magical spindles and spinning wheels and pottery wheels and looms and things. Physical crafts as a metaphor for mental crafts, right?
It turns out, this is exactly what I needed. Years and years later, after one manic bout of Yuletide writing I was finding it hard to sleep. All the stories were theoretically in (that's a complaint for another time and place) and I'd wrapped up a last 72-or-so-hour marathon frenzy of writing, but I couldn't sleep, I couldn't settle down, I couldn't think. My headspace was in whatever the stage beyond disarray. So I made use of all this imagery and meditation training, and I put it the hell back in order. If I created stories and worlds and things out of cones of imaginary yarn and blocks of make-believe clay, after a few straight days of mad frenzied creating my Workshop was probably in a state of tremendous chaos and mess, like a meatspace Workshop would be if I'd done the same thing in the physical world. And if had done that, then it needed to be cleaned up, right? I could wipe down the tables and put things back on shelves and sweep the dust from off the floor, too. And by the time I was done with that, I was a lot calmer and ready to sleep again.
Figuring that out was one of those big revelations that makes your life so much easier, you can't imagine how you did it the hard way all these years before. And yeah, I still have days when the deadlines are creeping up on me, or when I have five different things in my head all screaming to get out, or when I've been up too late and early and can't focus anyway. But having one more tool in my kit to put my mind in order doesn't hurt, and does help quite a bit.
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