AM I WRITING WELL?
Undated, 2021
These are the first words I’ve penned to paper since… Oh, I don’t know… A month? Possibly more. And as someone who likes to call himself a writer, sometimes, a part of me thinks this is sacrilege of the highest order.
Another part of me isn’t so bothered. After all, why write if you can’t physically bring yourself to? But some of the greats will tell you:
“Write. Even when you cannot. Even when you do not want to. Just force yourself to.”
And yeah, sure. But also, no. I can’t write when I do not want to. But what’s more, I don’t want to write when I feel I cannot. I don’t know why sometimes. I guess the reasons vary: stress, anxiety, time constraints… Stress, anxiety.
But you’re supposed to push past all that? Right? Isn’t that what separates the weed from the chaff? The unrelenting will to consistently write, even when every subatomic particle in your being tells you you’re a worthless hack? Eek. Sounds tough. And for a month(possibly more), I wanted no parts of that sisyphean labor.
But we’re here now, almost three paragraphs in, yeah! Look at us!
And I’m writing. Am I writing well? Am I doing the craft justice? Who cares? I mean, I did.
It’s why I stopped in the first place. But all that did was keep my thoughts off the page, stuck in my head, like billiard balls after a snap. Except there were no pockets for them to go into, because I didn’t have any outlet, or allow myself to have one.
As you can imagine it got pretty loud and distracting- what with all those numbered, multi-colored balls of thought bouncing around in the grass-green, felt surface of my mind.
I’m back to writing again, in part because I felt I needed to(if I want to keep calling myself a writer, that is), and because I’d recently read a book called Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.
This isn’t my unrelenting resolve forcing me back on the page. No.
It isn’t even Anne’s sage advice that writing, “in no way, shape, or form brings with it answers.”
So why am I still (talking) writing?
Here we are(now seven paragraphs in). Kudos to you, by the way, for hanging in there so long. Even though I’ve said nothing at all of value to you so far. Nothing you would really walk away with, nodding to yourself, thinking,
“yeah, this was helpful.”
But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself, or maybe that was never the goal. Maybe I just needed to say this and maybe it didn’t necessarily need to be heard.
Maybe all I wanted after all was to feel my thoughts mercifully exiting my mind.
To rest on this page.
