In which I admit my cowardice
It’s become ‘too hard’ under certain circumstances to keep carving out the time for my writing. I cannot be expected to have the time or the energy or the imagination to keep it up when I’ve got 50 other things breathing down my grill. Writing is kind of a luxary for me.
See how easily it slips from the fingers?
It’s a lie. A silky, common, and socially expected lie.
When writing doesn’t just flow, when it’s an effort– when I am between workable ideas and buried in the same few paragraphs (ones that seem good, but that don’t know what they’re doing), or when I have just come off of 8+ hours of fixing other peoples’ stupidity and am just so bone and soul tired…
Oh but it’s just this story. It has to be unworkable and it’s taken me 18 months to see that. Christ, if I’d only gone to school I would have noticed much sooner…
I try and wait for the weekends, hoping that not having the alarm and the office will magically open up some space in my head. Full-fledged stories will drip freely out! It’ll be amazing!!one!eleven!!! Who cares that I have chores! It will all just magically happen…
These are all lies that I tell myself. My wrongheadedness has gone so full circle that I don’t even need to look for excuses anymore. These are so well-crafted and cyclical that they just spring up, unbidden, even when I don’t particularly need them to. They just fly out of me and circle around as inevitable and heavy as the wafts of the garbage barges at Ashland & Clyborn.
Here is the simple truth:
I don’t always have the courage to write. To try. To just keep plugging away at the blank page without thinking forward. Overthinking.
It’s a lot like my EMDR therapy. Even though its allowing me to do things I thought were impossible, I dread it. Sometimes even while I’m doing it. But I feel great rewards, just like writing. In fact, EMR is a kind of neurological writing. Rewriting, to be precise. I have the freedom to rewrite the past in my brain. I also have the freedom to rewrite the future, the possible, the almost not real on the page.
I am thankful for both, but I have a lot of trouble wielding these pens. I want to go all Johnny Wu style all over the place, but I need to make myself brave enough. I am hoping for courage.
Writing is HARD. It’s OK to have trouble sometimes.
Even if ’sometimes’ is more like ‘most of the time?’
Yes.
“bone and soul tired” is one of the most beautiful fragments I’ve ever read. In fact it makes me realise you like using bones as imagery in your writing. I still have in my head parts of a poem you gave me where you told me ‘your home is your bones’. You never know what someone might get from your writing.
You criticise your writing in every particular, but a reader may be uplifted by a random piece or the whole. Frankly, it is not for you to judge the quality of your own work. Your craft yes, but your work no. Feel me?