This morning started with an 11am pot of coffee. Well, in reality it started several hours earlier when I was rudely awoken by my boyfriend. Somewhere he read that waking at 5am is good for ones productivity and, to my disdain, he has been working towards this. Either way, by 11am I was home and all out of social media to distract myself with, so I put on the coffee and got my own ‘early’ start to the day.
By midday I had gone through edits for my weeks pieces for The Courier, responded to a couple of emails, and had moved on to the more important task at hand; immigration paperwork. It was approximately three minutes into this task that I called my boyfriend crying about the fact that I couldn’t find my filled out paperwork.
“I know it doesn’t seem this way, but everything is going to be okay.” he said.
“I know! I know that, but you don’t understand. This is a small task that I’ve done too many times and right now I just have to cry to you about it, okay?” I said this strangled statement through tears, before hanging up.
I proceeded to spend the next three hours wading through Canadian immigration forms and crying out every time something went wrong - every five minutes. Slow, but surely, I got through the paperwork until I had reached the point of submitting my first application. After an errands trip to drop off the other forms and an unusually pleasant call to the government in search of t4’s, I found myself at home again.
For the first time in months I was free of immigration paperwork to do’s - my wallet having taken most of the impact - and felt this weird sensation. I felt creative. Maybe an unusual thing for somebody with a creative writing degree to say, but it had been months.
After months of writing news articles for The Courier, environment articles for The Blank Page, and a whole lot of nothing else, I actually wanted to make something. I had forgotten the feeling of not being weighed down by paperwork, but today served as a reminder that creativity needs space and sometimes that space requires endless hours of paperwork to make the other stresses go away.