Today I went for “coffee” with my daughter’s best friend’s mom, who somehow manages to gently kick me in the ass every time I see her. She asked how my writing is going, and I answered honestly, it’s not. I have a relatively new job that is a ton of responsibility. I am always too tired to write at night, that’s been true for years, but I do a true commute now so my early getting up is for driving and not creation. I’m distressed by this, but I’m not in a position to move closer to work just yet, so I’m trying to figure out a way to make everything work in the meantime. She nodded and then said something very wise and also ass-kicky.
She said a friend of hers who is a systems analyst once told her that when you have a log jam like mine, you have to devote ALL OF YOUR RESOURCES to resolving it as soon as you recognize it. Like you can’t just think about the problem in your spare time, you have to make fixing it your primary goal. Otherwise, the bottle neck won’t clear itself, and eventually everything—your talent, drive, passion—will clog the opening and it will get harder and harder to unplug, to the point that your life will just begin flowing around it, making new paths that don’t use what you’ve left behind.
If this doesn’t ring true to you, then it probably doesn’t apply, but good Christ did it hit home with me. I’m not working on finding time to write at all, and I need to be, not out of obligation but because I fucking love to write. It’s when I’m most myself, when I feel most alive and connected. I love my job, but it’s what I do, not who I am. I think about writing, but it’s a distant kind of “yeah I should figure that out” kind of thought. Then the next day my alarm goes off at 5, I do Connections and the Wordle, throw on some work pajamas (scrubs) and roll out. I get home sometime around 7 or 8, maybe eat something, give the cats who don’t sleep with me some quality time, and crash. I already feel those new pathways forming, and you know, I had writer’s block for 25 long years while I was on SSRIs, and I do not want to go back.
So now I am going to figure this out.