The Wrong Side of Quickening

Suffering Sunday #2 – August16

The physical suffering was more pronounced this go around! After months upon months of a sedentary lifestyle—justified by working on my MFA while working full time—the exercising has begun. It’s like the quickening, if you’re the one being beheaded.

I’ve returned to the gym (thank you, new apartment!) and gearing up for going back to the Manitou Incline, and restarted with the Jack Quinn’s Running Club. I’ve started over enough times in my life to know that I hate it, but here I am again, starting over.

I’m sore, I’m tired, I’m always hungry, and I somehow feel weaker than I did when my biggest exercise involved putting the recliner foot down and taking the stairs at work. But it also feels good to be moving again. I know it will be some time before I’m able to notice any progress, and sticking with things until then is important. I’d like to be in better shape, you know, for the coming apocalypse and all, but also just to feel stronger, healthier, as I enter the next big birthday. My age is starting to feel serious and I’d like to be as preemptive as I can about taking care of my future self.

This month brought a couple of rejections to pile onto the physical discomfort. I’m all for celebrating a rejection, now, but they do start to add up. One came in for a short story submitted last year and another for the last batch of querying. I have been feeling like I could use a win, but the only way that can happen is by submitting more work, so on to the next one. I’m hoping to send out another half-dozen queries before the end of the month, and get a few short story submissions sent off. Hopefully that win will come through, but if not, I guess it’s more fodder for next month’s suffering newsletter.

The teaching semester has started up, and I’m nervous, excited, exhausted, and all of it. With my newest teaching endeavor, there’s quite a large learning curve, but I’m at the point now that I’m feeling more excited than nervous, and I suppose the worst that can happen is I’ll discover I don’t love this particular teaching path and I’ll do something different after a few months.

Still, it’s a challenging point of the year, the start of a new semester, and easing back into those rhythms and patterns always takes a little time. This weekend, I had a long to do list waiting, but my body put up a fight and I just rested and read and spent some time in my natural state (supine) instead. I suppose that lengthens the list for the week, but I needed the rest, and I got to devour a great book (Tana French’s Faithful Place) so I’m not going to fret over it.