I don’t feel like writing today. I don’t have anything to say. Wait, that’s not true: I always have something to say and today, like every other day, I have way more to say than I have time or energy to say it. I just don’t feel like enduring the process today.
Everything I start gets mundane even before I’ve gotten to the first point. My writing is bland and it is boring me to death! I guess I’m getting on my own “last Jesus nerve”! (I love that phrase. My dear Southern friend, Carolyn, blurted it out one day and it so tickled me.)
I usually like myself and I enjoy my own company. When I write, I like being able to hang out with “ME”. Writing is a very solitary activity, so befriending oneself is of utter importance. Well, today I just wish that “ME” would leave me alone!
Blah, blah, blah! She just keeps rambling on and on about nothing!
Have you ever been at a party or some other social function when you hear yourself talking and you just can’t believe how stupid you sound? You scream to yourself inside your head, “Shut up!” Yet the outside self just keeps going on, this constant, obnoxious drone. That’s what my writing sounds like to me today. It’s an irritating squeaking voice, one that grates on the nerves like fingernails on a chalk board.
What I have to say is interesting stuff – no, it’s better than that – its fascinating! Its fascinating inside my head; but when it comes out on the paper it is a heavy, droning, monotone. It’s painfully boring!
“Shut up!” I bark to myself, “who cares? Nobody!” I try another sentence. “Give it up, you fool!” I think that if I just put the general ideas down, I can go back later and write it with a new voice. “What a waste of time.” It’s not like I have nothing else to do. Good grief, I have half-read books all over the house that I need to return to; I have to fix the dryer so I can finish the laundry; I have children with needs and dogs that are waiting to be fed. Oh yeah, and I have a “real job” I have to do to today, too.
“So shut up! Stop writing!!”
My writing muse smiles ever so slightly, a tiny upward curvature at the corners of her mouth that draw my attention her way. She nods, a movement so small that it is nearly invisible, yet I saw it. She looked at me, and she nodded approval.
I don’t have to write anything at all, but I do have to sit with the empty page. That much she asks of me. I can finally shut up, knowing that I can not shut down.
I don’t feel like writing today, and that’s OK.
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