What’s Holding You Back; or, sometimes the thing you are battling in the thing you need to embrace

I’ve been doing some soul-searching about what I really want out of life in 2012 and going forward and how to actually move towards those things. And I think that I’ve discovered that some things I thought were beyond me are actually within my grasp; I just have to take action.
If you read this blog regularly, you probably already know I’ve been struggling with different health problems for some time. My immune system is a bit wonky, so Christmas brought me a bout of flu, followed by another bout, this week, of strep throat. Just when I was feeling super productive I was knocked back into bed! I get, you know, angry about these health problems sometimes, because it feels like they’re standing in my way. If I didn’t have some neat rheumatogical joint problems, I’d be back to walking two miles a day, instead of about 400 feet max (with one or two stairs thrown in for practice.) If I didn’t have a wonky immune system, I might not catch every germ that went around. If I wasn’t hampered by health problems of various sorts, I’d be able to travel more, work a regular office job. I think of my life if I didn’t have health problems as a shiny, glowing one, filled with success, joy, productivity.
But wait. Maybe that’s a lie. Maybe the thing I think is standing in my way – my health stuff – just gives me a different way to approach life. Sure, this last year I couldn’t travel much – not back to see my family for holidays in the midwest, not to promote my book – and this chafed. I don’t like being told I can’t do things. Particularly by my own body.
But if my body was different, perhaps I wouldn’t have written as much as I have this last couple of years. Perhaps I would have written material that lacked…I don’t know, something. You can’t see what alternate-universe you might be writing, but if things had come easier for me, perhaps that would have increased a certain tendency towards, well, things like shallowness and selfishness. I almost certainly, in alternate-healthy-universe, would have taken my robust health for granted, because I did exactly that, back before I started having the problems. I didn’t feel grateful for the ability to run through a field, to hike a mountain or eat whatever I wanted or hop on a plane a handful of times a year without coming down with pneumonia. My husband’s endless generosity and support towards me and my writing – I might never have even noticed it.
So, perhaps, instead of seeing my health problems as some kind of insurmountable obstacle, some limitation, something always in my path, I can embrace it, actually figure out a way to attain all my goals, not in spite of my health stuff, but with it, beside it. Ditch fear and be realistic; hey, maybe I can’t eat wheat or hike a mountain these days, but I can try writing in other genres, be a bit more fearless in how and where I send out my work, read more adventurously and more widely. I can do all those things without a single change in my health.
I can stop whining about how hard it is to be a poet. It’s hard because we make it hard. I was just reading a memoir in which John Berryman complained about the lack of audience for poetry…in 1941. The complaints of poets don’t really change. He complained, how am I supposed to make a living? What do I do with these tiny unenthusiastic modern American poetry audiences? Things I bet you and I still say today. But really, instead of complaining, how can we expand our dreams and actually turn them into reality? How can we make money by writing? How can we expand the audience for poetry? If we are miserable, it is almost certain that some of it is our own fault, for giving up, for looking at daunting odds and saying: I can’t do that. I’m not healthy enough. I don’t live in New York City. No one buys poetry. I’m not in with the right crowd. I’m not a male. Etc.
But what if we embrace the exact circumstances we’re in, and just go like a whirling dervish at the things we are, the things we can do, as long as we can do them? That’s an attitude I’d like to have.