As you may have noticed, I took a bit of a break. Why? Oh, I just wanted to take some time to figure things out, to think about better ways to approach my life. I wanted to see what a month or two looked like without writing weekly essays, I wanted to see if the energy I was putting into this blog could be better applied elsewhere, I wanted to take a step away and let my creative juices recharge. And now, some two months or so later, I’m not sure I really got any of those things. No answers, or at least ones that I remember finding – perhaps some insights that have, by now, just dissolved into my mind like sugar in water, just becoming part of the store of accumulated thought that I drag behind me. Things have moved, but nothing’s moved enough that I can tell what’s changed. I think I’m satisfied anyway, for now.
Now we come to the next step of the experiment, from minimum to maximum: Having written 0 posts for the last month, I’m now going to write a post every day this month. NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, has designated November as the official month of writing a tremendous crapload of words and hoping something worthwhile emerges out from them. Though if I were aiming to hit the NaNoWriMo goals I would be aiming for an average 1,200 words a day, most of the posts I write this month will probably be less than 500 words. Still, that’s a lot of topics and words on those topics, so it’s time to get comfortable with not always knowing where I’m going, not always taking the time to choose a topic that I know is worthwhile and an approach that I know is going to be interesting, and to just try flying blind for a while.
Something that has become clear to me, from reflecting back on my approach to creativity and the work which has emerged from it, is that I need to be more comfortable with not always producing my best work. I wear my ambitions around my neck and they’re just too damn heavy, and it’s become increasingly apparent that the thing that makes it hardest to attain my dreams is how tightly I cling to them, like trying to swim laps while carrying a bar of gold. It’s not easy to let go, though. It’s not easy to try to do things the easy way. I feel so much resistance against taking the path of least resistance, and I don’t know, still, exactly what I should be doing about that.
I do know I should be writing more, though. Over the time I spent not writing, I learned what therapeutic value the practice had subtly offered. It’s an exorcism, expelling the ghosts of my anxieties into words. It’s often hard for me to not be overwhelmed by the many words that try to occupy my mind all at once, a mental juggling act, and it’s a terrifying relief to, just once in a while, be able to put down my thoughts.
This is what change is going to look like: Not a grasping, but a letting go. Motion, not frozen in place. I still don’t have the full sense of what that’s going to look like for me, but at least I have an idea.