My Writing Armistice

I’ve come to this conclusion: if the wars in your head ever stop, you’re done for.

There have been a couple of wars going on in my head lately. One of them is about this blog.

Do I write every day and suffer the not infrequent dread of it being 11:30 p.m. and having to come up with words? Or do I write when I am so moved which is, if I’m honest, rarely. The muse doesn’t chase me around the table while I play hard to get, it heads straight out the door to take up with more willing partners.

I want to say that I have been of two minds about writing every day. Mostly I want to say it because it has to be one of the most descriptive phrases ever.

My not-writing everyday mind says I should save myself for great essays, that all the words I use here could be better used in a longer essay that some journal publishes after I’ve shopped it around for a year or I publish myself in a book that won’t be finished until I’m eating pureed peach cobbler from a spoon held by a stranger.

My writing every day mind says I risk becoming a depressed mess, a triple knot in a cheap necklace if I run around mute all the time. If the adage, ‘I don’t know what I think until I write it down’ is as true as I’ve always said it is, then I will be perpetually bewildered unless I get my daily writing act together.

Plus daily writing encourages observation and analysis, greater presence, and discipline which I really need right now, having lived a long life of obligation and expectation, and now refashioning that into a new persona, a new way of being. I can either become slack from having all the external demands removed or reconstruct myself from the inside out as a tougher, more insightful, and more skilled person.

So I am back to writing every day – unless, unless – but it will be an intention rather than a bar room bet. Long, short, pretty good, not so hot, there will be something in this space until, you know, the war starts up again.