Why write? Attempt the Second

Or, Trying To Convince Oneself That One Has Not Been Lazy

Photo by Anastasiia Krutota on Unsplash

I haven’t written for one hundred and thirty-nine days.

Not that I’m keeping count. It’s surprisingly easy to calculate if you remember to carry the ones.

It has taken a real act of will to press the button and open up a new draft. I find my mind squirrelling off to the feed, or to check my email, or to find another video to watch. Any excuse to avoid the actual recording of actual words representing actual thoughts. So far the excuses have been working. Until today.

I have plenty of reasons not to write, that become reasons to write if one looks closely. I took up an extra day of consulting- now I’m on four days a week. One would think that I would be more busy, but actually the intensity of the patient load has decreased. (The persistent rain might also be a factor. For some reason, sunny days make hanging around in a doctor’s waiting rain more attractive. I can’t explain why.) So I have large blocks of time stuck in my office, waiting for work. Large blocks of time that I could be writing in.

Increasing consulting days, though, decreases home days, which means things like when laundry gets washed, or if vacuuming happens, or if home homework gets set for the kids, needs to be reconsidered. (For those wondering what home homework is: Asian kids don’t get their reputation by accident. If you’re not doing an extra hour or two of academic/music practice to keep ahead of your peers at school, are you even Asian? Funny, hilarious even, but no one is laughing on the inside.) (Also, yes, Mr. Husband has a much more flexible schedule and could manage housework with very specific instructions, but can’t be trusted to see and clean dirt independently. This may or may not be consequential to the genetic predispositions of his biological sex.) Carving out time at home to write therefore becomes more difficult. I am envious of people who write for a living, who can set aside hours of the day to sit in reflection, catching drops of wisdom in wordy webs. Yet- it is not the words that are the treasure, but the wisdom. And reflection, I have discovered, can and should happen anywhere, everywhen.

Often when there is an opportunity for reflection, I instinctively reach for that cursed slab of distracting computation. Instinct, because I think there is something deep inside me that knows reflection is dangerous and best to be avoided if at all feasible. Something like a wild horse avoiding smoke and fences, knowing that down that path lies discipline, domestication, duty.

Does it speak to the longing of today’s worldview for freedom that all those words sound oppressive? I don’t mean them that way, though. If there is a part of me, like a beast untamed refusing any authority, then there is another part of me that knows submission means being part of something greater, achieving something better than I could have on my own whims and fancies. To discipline fancy into considered thought; to domesticate desires into passions; to commit to whims and make of them, through practice, habits of creation- this is what it is to be tamed. Being tame is not a state of oppression, but a state of control and therefore a state of achievement.

Here I am, writing about discipline, and yet I have wandered off the tangent of my thought. My thoughts alternately pull at the bit, then stand stubbornly and refuse to progress. Words are a bridle that keep my thoughts on a path to somewhere, instead of circling aimlessly and then giving up any pretense of direction.

What other reasons do I have not to write? The biggest was tiredness. But now- consulting more, taking on more roles in various spheres of life, fitting housework around everything- the exhaustion has drained away. How is it that in agreeing to do more I feel more able to do more?

I wonder whether it was an issue of agency. Not that I’m being forced to do anything I haven’t chosen to do. But perhaps I was setting unrealistically high expectations of what I was able to achieve, given my prior responsibilities and available time and hence pressuring myself into fulfilling what I couldn’t. Can one lose agency through repeated failure? Or surrender it?

Regardless, that was a something of a perambulation through the forest of excuses to find the trees thinning, a vista opening, and a desire to once again roam the fanciful world of cognition, harnessed and ready for action again.