Scribble, scribble, scribble

It has been a good day today. Cheeriness came in spasms, mainly due to the lovely, cool, grey rains. I sat reading the latest Vogue edition on the terrace. The magazine spoke of a trend called Sicilian White - which is head-to-toe white dressing with gold accents. I like that theme but looking around me, I figure it is probably better suited to Sicily. Sicilian white in Mumbai is hard to wear. In monsoons, it is nearly impossible unless one wants a delicate fringing pattern of splattered mud.

I am really at a loss. I have no clue what I need to do from this point on. It's a very strange, unsettling, dark feeling. It's like somewhere I have lost the plot. So, I have to stop everything that I am doing and take care of unfinished business:

My divorce - which has been pending for so long now.
My writing.
My book or movie script.
My yoga practice where I can do the shirshasan and halasan and thousand suryanamaskars a day.
My first long meditation retreat.
My first experience of having enough money in the bank to brunch at the Zodiac Grill every single day for the rest of my life.

There is so much work and such little time. I can't get to the zone where I can figure out what to do to get all these things in place.

Honestly, I need a manager. I was such an accomplished kid - topped my class, in the tenth topped my school and the zone and stood seventh in the state or something, won elocutions everywhere, debates aplenty, was the class captain for many grades, etc. etc. I think all this was possible because my mother was strict. She worked me to the bone and rarely took 'No' for an answer.

Then somewhere along the way, my mother got more understanding or something. There was all of that, "No matter what you do we will love you" etc. Maybe that's when the unravelling began. I wonder if all this independence has been good for me. Maybe if I were forced to work hard and write 10,000 words every 3 days, I would have accomplished something. My ex-husband and I had thought of opening a fund for public interest litigations. He had even gotten me all the required material and case laws. I had to go through them and come up with a proposal to be submitted to some government agency. I got distracted doing other things. He never ever pushed me to get to it. If I berated myself sometimes, he'd say, "Don't worry. It's okay." So that got strewn on the wayside.

These many months of freelance has taught me something. I am not indisciplined. I can set down a time schedule and a budget and stick to it. But I am spoilt. It hurts me to accept this but I think that is why I feel held back. I look around desperately for someone to blame and there's nobody. Sigh! What can I say? I suffer because I have always been accepted for who I was. The tragedy that is my life.

So, the plan is to introduce some rigor into my life - in the form of an impossible to please person. Maybe a really stringent editor who ensures that I write 25 articles a day. Maybe a fitness trainer who makes me do 400 crunches a session. Maybe a teacher who will keep returning assignments until I turn in a brilliant piece. Someone who will not get cowed down when I get stubborn and angry. Someone who will push me through my breaking point.

I accept it - I cannot do it by myself at this point.

Dear Universe, please send me someone who makes me that person Rudward Kilping wrote about. I want to be the one who can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run.

Amen.