{"id":950,"date":"2011-05-16T12:06:48","date_gmt":"2011-05-16T16:06:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.old.caraghobrien.com\/book\/?p=950"},"modified":"2011-05-16T12:24:17","modified_gmt":"2011-05-16T16:24:17","slug":"the-other-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/writing\/the-other-reality\/","title":{"rendered":"The Other Reality"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was an hour late to my son\u2019s crew regatta Friday because I was writing and lost track of time. My husband tried calling me when I didn\u2019t arrive to pick him up as planned, but I ignored the phone, and even when he walked home to find me, I just thought he was early and kept writing on the back porch.\u00a0 In short, the portal to this world was closed.\u00a0 Only awareness that my husband was eating lunch finally penetrated to my consciousness and brought me back.\u00a0 Food, it turns out, is a powerful cross-worlds communication link.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Quonnipaug Lake, Connecticut, May 2011<\/p><\/div>\n

The day turned out all right.\u00a0 My son\u2019s race was late in the line-up and there\u2019s a lot of standing around at regattas anyway, so we didn\u2019t miss anything.\u00a0 Even so, I was embarrassed with myself, which is a strange type of embarrassment.\u00a0 I don\u2019t want to be that spacey a person.\u00a0 It feels irresponsible and selfish to check out of reality so completely.<\/p>\n

In a contradictory direction, I sometimes feel guilty that my job is this self-indulgent escape from reality while plenty of other people living on our planet have no escape from their hunger and war and homelessness.\u00a0 I feel like I ought to be working harder to deserve the happy time in my head.\u00a0 I feel like I need to earn it when other people, like other versions of me at other times, are enduring crappy jobs when they\u2019d rather be artists.\u00a0 If I have an unproductive day, I\u2019m wasting much more than just those hours.\u00a0 I\u2019m wasting a cushy gift of opportunity.<\/p>\n

I think about what I would have given, back when I was a stay-at-home parent with two little offspring, for a day of nothing to do but write.\u00a0 It was impossible to arrange.\u00a0 For the sake of that starved, mind-benumbed version of me, I feel like I can\u2019t afford to waste a single writing minute.\u00a0 I can\u2019t forget how terrible it was then, writing deep into the night when my family was asleep, knowing the longer I wrote, the more exhausted I\u2019d be the next day, and how much worse reality would be because of it.\u00a0 The escape time poisoned the real time, but like an addict, I had to have it.<\/p>\n

Now, somewhere between these two extremes\u2014writing myself out of reality and chastising myself for not writing enough\u2014there is probably a place where I\u2019m doing enough writing and also clued in enough to my family and my real world.\u00a0 How to find that place is the question.\u00a0 I\u2019m open to suggestions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was an hour late to my son\u2019s crew regatta Friday because I was writing and lost track of time. My husband tried calling me when I didn\u2019t arrive to pick him up as planned, but I ignored the phone, and even when he walked home to find me, I just thought he was early […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=950"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":953,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950\/revisions\/953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}