“What’s wrong with you?”

That’s the question I’ve been asking myself for a while now. I’ve been tired, really deeply tired. I’ve done the work I’ve needed to, but almost none of my own work — it’s been ages since I’ve written even a poem, and the short story I’m working on is waiting on my laptop, half-written. As is a novel manuscript.

So, what’s wrong with me?

I think it began after my third novel came out. I was so exhausted from publishing three novels in three years, while teaching more than full time, that I needed time to rest and recharge. I was just getting started again, working on the next project, when the pandemic came. I’m sure this is true for most of us, but that was one of the most difficult and exhausting times of my life. I taught on Zoom, and then in a hybrid format, and after dealing with the challenges of daily living (finding toilet paper!) and teaching during the pandemic (lecturing through a mask!), I did not have the mental and physical energy to do anything else. Just as the pandemic was ending, I was lucky enough get a semester off from teaching to work on a special project for the university, and then for the next semester, I got a Fulbright to teach in Hungary. We started that semester remote, then went to in-person classes . . . just as the war started in Ukraine. I ended up both teaching my university classes and teaching English to Ukrainian refugees. That semester, I was asked to teach an extra summer semester in London, which I did, and in the fall I started preparing to teach in a new program, where I taught this spring.

Yes, it was as complicated as it sounds, and on the one hand, I’m delighted to have had so many opportunities — I loved the Fulbright, love the program I’m teaching in now, am excited to be teaching in London again this summer. On the other hand, just writing all this makes me tired.

The problem, I think, is that I’m trying to live two lives at once. I’m trying to be a teacher, and also a writer. At the same time, I have one life in the United States, and one in Europe. I don’t know, maybe that’s actually four lives, if we think of it as two times two? And of course, I have a daughter who just started college this year . . . That’s a whole other life in the midst of these two (or four).

No wonder there are times when I feel overwhelmed.

This is where I had gotten to in writing my blog post when I had to stop, because there were too many other things to do . . . I had to take my daughter to kendo practice, yes in Budapest (taught in Hungarian and Japanese), and by the time we got back it was too late to finish. The next morning I had to get her off to Hungarian class, and since it’s the beginning of the month, I had financial things to figure out — money to transfer, bills to pay. There are all sorts of things I’m late on (not bills, administrative things). And of course, soon I have to focus on preparing for the summer semester in London.

So what’s wrong with me? Maybe it’s simply that life has been overwhelming for a while. I’m hoping that it will calm down, and I will be able to focus on writing again. After all, I’m writing here, now, right? That’s something.

I started this blog post with “it’s been ages since I’ve written even a poem,” but between the time I started and the time I’m writing this — now, this minute — I wrote a poem. I wrote it while waiting for my daughter to finish her kendo class, sitting in the rose garden at the Millennium Háza in the Városliget, which means the City Park. It’s a large central park in Budapest, very beautiful, with tall old trees and winding trails, with museums and botanical plantings, a café and a hill for dogs to run on, a closed garden of textures and scents specifically for those who are blind or have disabilities related to sight. Right now, in June, the rose garden is filled with blooming roses. They inspired me the way they always do — that is, I think roses are very strange flowers, wise and secretive, hiding whatever they know within their ruffled petals. They are stronger than they look, and of course they have thorns — we know they do, and yet we forget about the thorns, or at least I always do. I reach for the beautifully scented blossoms and get pricked.

The poem I wrote can be found on my poetry site, so if you’re interested, you can find it there. It’s called “Portrait of a Lady.” I’m not sure where it came from. Like many of my poems, it just happened. I wrote the first stanza:

She sits on a stone bench
in the city park, under a bush
of pink roses, probably
something like Maiden’s Blush,
because they have so many
petals — you know the kind
I mean, that blossom in June
and release, if you lean in closely,
the most delicious perfume.

The poem is not about me, of course. But I was imagining another woman sitting where I was sitting, reading a book (I had brought several — I’m always afraid of running out of books). And I wondered what her story might be, and then I thought — whoever is watching her, writing a poem about her, doesn’t know and can’t know. But the roses know, because they know everything. There is a reason we say that whatever is secret is told “sub rosa.” (I don’t mean the technical reason, having to do with roses on ceilings. I mean a mystical reason. Roses just know. Remember that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry made the two great loves of his Little Prince a fox and a rose.)

Why did I write a poem, there and then? After all, I had books with me, three of them (just in case I ran out of books). I could have read one of them. Instead, I imagined something and wrote it down.

And that, in the end, is what is wrong with me. I have a mind that does that — that makes things up and writes them down, that sees secrets in the roses. And also a mind that gets overwhelmed by the demands of the world, and then gets angry and desperate because it can’t do what it does naturally, which is hold conversations with foxes and roses, and scribble silly rhymes.

Where have I gotten with all this? I have no idea. Except that I’m really thoroughly tired of not writing about roses or Budapest or whatever else. And I don’t have a solution, exactly — I still have half a short story, not to mention half a novel, on my laptop. But even writing about the problem is clarifying.

(The writer in the rose garden, after having written a poem.)