Somehow I’ve crawled from beneath the dust of my own writer’s block to return to this silly little project I started awhile ago.
It’s remarkable – the timbre of the voice that says “your writing will never be as good as it was, and it wasn’t even that good to begin with.”
I don’t know why I put myself through this. Everything, even the most basic steps, seems exhausting. Some days I don’t even unpack the keyboard, and I’ll spend endless hours refreshing Twitter or deep in a Wikipedia black hole about George McGovern, leaving the one thing I *should* be doing unattended.
In a sense it’s like eating healthy – you know you *should* be eating that salad, but you opt for the burger instead, and you tell yourself you’ll have a salad tomorrow. And then you’re 200 lbs.
When I write, it doesn’t seem like it’s me speaking – I’m just channeling a voice. It’s like a one-sided conversation, and I don’t think of anyone reading or hearing it, it just is.
But I can’t just *be*. If I’m not stressed over something, it feels like I’m not doing something. And if I’m not doing something, I have no action from which to derive my self-worth.
It’s all a grand self-defeating symphony.
When I’m happy, I don’t feel like writing. I’m happy, why would I jeopardize that precarious mood by delving into uncomfortable topics? The last thing you want when you’re up is the creeping sense of “not THIS shit again”.
And when I’m down, I don’t have the energy to really do anything anyway.
So there’s a very specific mood I have to be in to write, and it’s just the right teetering of existential despair, free time without distraction, more than $50 in my bank account, and nothing that exciting happening on Twitter.
When I started the one post a day challenge, I thought it would be a neat way to hold myself accountable. And it felt good to do at the time, but then one day I’d get behind and then one day turned into a week and so on and I thought “well, maybe I can just outrun this ridiculous thing I signed myself up to do”.
And here we are, and a part of me misses the daily accountability and the opportunity for the tens of you to read what was going on in my head that day and the brief ford in the stream of consciousness that is my life.
So I’m back. For now. We’ll see. Until, say, the images of Felicity Huffman’s arrest come out and I spend a couple hours scrolling through memes.
