The Daily Grinder

Keep writing through it all. If you only wrote when motivated, you’d be a poet.
--Pirateaba, author of The Wandering Inn

Words cannot express how much I hate this idea, how long I have bucked it, and the depth of my dread at the prospect of finally facing it.

Unfortunately for me, it's literally my soul purpose to hunt those words down, hogtie them, and drag them back kicking and screaming.

I knew I'd addressed this idea before, so I dredged my old Tumblr blog until I found the 2016 post I was looking for: Real Writer™. In it, I describe the difficulty of maintaining emotional stability for an insomniac, flaming introvert like me who was holding down a 9-5 job, and how that made it just a wee bit difficult to pull together enough brain and energy to focus on being creative. Throw in a turbulent argument with friend or family member and salt liberally with glimpses of the frightening darkness humanity was capable of flashing onto my news feed, and you had a recipe for a desperate escapist, not a budding writer ready to slam aesthetically pleasing words together on a daily basis.

I rejected the advice I heard ad nauseam that a writer needs to write every day, even if it's only a little bit, even if you only fill a sticky note. I resented this claim, especially on the days when existence itself felt like a burden. Far better, I decided, to wait for a day when I had some measure of creative flow, ride it through a couple thousand words, and call it good. I even came up with a defensive allegory I used to tell people: Would you ask a chef who had lost their sense of smell to cook? Smell affects taste, and to guide a dish a chef often has to taste their cooking to make sure they're going in the right direction. You can't ask me to write when I'm numb or in despair, because I need to be able to feel everything my characters are feeling to write anything worthwhile.

Nice try, past me, but that little story cuts both ways.

A chef might not be able to make a new masterpiece with a stuffy nose, but they can still make a pleasant--or at least edible--meal by precisely following a recipe. Every dish created is practice, even if it is not perfection. Add to that the fact that the restaurant cannot halt just because of the chef's stuffy nose, but must keep its doors open and its customers satisfied, and I am thoroughly rebutted.

I see my past self going off to sulk. It's okay. She'll live.

Here's the thing, I still believe that a writer who only writes when they're able to can still be a Real Writer. I think there are genuine issues of mental illness throttling the creative process in a way that is rapidly accumulating as generations pass. Yes, there were such issues before and more often than not writers and artists were just people hurling paint and words at their own darkness to keep it at bay. At the same time, as a friend once asked, "What do you do when you have a monster inside you that eats motivation?" It is hard, and what each person is truly able to call their best is going to be different from person to person--and even within a single person, different from time period to time period.

Past me may not have exerted herself as much as she could have, but she was doing her best to survive with the tools she had on hand. She was a Real Writer for the time period she was in.

But now it's 2023. Now, I do not have a 9-5 (for which I am grateful). My husband and I have worked long enough on figuring out my insomnia issues that such nights are now the exception and not the rule, so I get enough sleep. My environs are mostly orderly and clean which contributes to my stability. I have cut myself off from social media so that I don't spiral out of control when I see disturbing news or venemous words. Recently I have found a new baseline of calm thanks to going decaf and taking lavender supplements. There have been a hundred little adjustments and life-changes that have healed suppurating emotional wounds I thought I'd never be without. It has been a long, slow recovery of the soul.

So, under these conditions, if I'm still only writing whenever I feel like it, am I really a Real Writer, or am I being a bit lazy?

I was reading The Wandering Inn, an engrossing work of fiction by Pirateaba. I don't often read the author's notes because most of the time I'm eagerly blazing off to the next chapter, but I did pause long enough to read what Pirateaba had to say about real life a couple weeks ago. It pissed me off to hear this piece of writing advice echoed to me yet again, but if I'm to be honest, it pissed me off because I knew deep down that this writer was correct. At least, for who I am now at this moment, this writer was correct. Perhaps not for the person I was in 2016 and the surrounding years, but for me today? Dead on.

I hate everything. No. Why is it this way. Refuse.

I frantically tossed excuses out like grenades. Sure, I have MORE energy than I used to but it's still really limited. I have to keep things clean around here. I'm reading all kinds of good books and listening to really informative podcasts. There's a chunk of almost every day dedicated to being at the gym for health and fitness. I've got a YouTube channel to, um, sporadically keep up. I have a bunch of art projects I could be working on! And, um, there's those people I haven't visited/talked to online in a long time that I need to... I don't WANT to face the blank page without inspiration!!!

It always ends in that wail of terror, doesn't it? I don't want to feel like a failure. I don't know how long I can survive the feeling of being a fraud.

But if I were to be honest about the other feelings I shove away when I'm that ashamed of my inability to coax words out of myself, I'd also say, I am stagnating with no discipline, so discipline is the next logical step in growth. Without growth, I will never weave the stories I have to tell. I can't stand not living up to my full potential. I can't stand this being as good as it gets, so I need to step into the next level.

Recently I closed out all open tabs that had half-finished podcasts, interviews, or videos that had been sent to me and swore off listening to them for now. I have, many times, warned my YouTube channel that my updates will be very sporadic, but it's time to take that seriously and drop that project out of my immediate focus. I told some people I am unable to be available at the level of frequency they might wish for and apologized, cutting off the constant guilt that was dragging at the edges of my focus. I swept a bunch of books I'd been avoiding-but-swearing-to-read-someday into a box. I channeled Marie Kondo even further and swept through my art supplies, filling another decent-sized box with items that had been waiting around far too long for me to do something with them. Guilt-riddled items in my line of sight had to go.

Just today, I turned down an invitation to start taking classes at a local dance studio with my husband and friends. Does it sound like fun? Yes. But. I've never tried to take writing seriously before. Right now, it's time to trim more things from my life than I add.

I believe I will find a balance, but for now I'm going to dive into this for real. Every day there must be some writing even if that means staring at the dreaded empty page until it comes. Even if I think it's garbage. Even if I can't feel anything. It can be a letter, it can be fanfiction, it can be original fiction, or it can be a blog post (gee, I wonder if you'll be seeing more updates here?) but I have to take this seriously, and not just try, but actually do it.

The daily grinder I'm facing will see me putting out a great flow some days, and other days will likely see me tearing my hair out over a paragraph. But it's time to do, and not just give a half-hearted try.

God, give me strength. Be with me. Inspire me. Show me how to build structure into my life to make this happen. Show me how to safeguard my time and boundaries without ejecting everyone and everything from my life. Show me what this time is all about.