This is my 14th week in a row of posting, which is twice as long as I’ve ever kept up a weekly writing and posting streak before, so that feels like something to celebrate. I’m also struggling to think straight and/or write anything of value right now because I’m sitting in a coffee shop with music that feels, both in tone and definitely in volume, most appropriate for a nightclub. And, of course, today is the day that I forgot my headphones at home in my rush to get out the door roughly 20 minutes after the babysitter arrived.
A friend asked me the other day about how it’s been to write and share this regularly for so many weeks, and that got me thinking about it. So, a short list of what I’ve noticed so far:
I feel a level of commitment to this that I’ve rarely felt before for anything that is, technically speaking, optional. It truly is non-negotiable to me that I get this out each week. It’s not a matter of if, and whether I have the time or I have something that feels worthy of sharing. It’s simply a matter of when I’m going to sit down and get this out. It has to happen at some point. That part isn’t a negotiation. It reminds me of various periods in my life when I haven’t been drinking alcohol, and getting to someone’s house, or sitting down at a restaurant, there just wasn’t the same humming and hawing and I really should / shouldn’t, but I really want to... That decision had already been made for me long before the moment of choice arrived, and I felt a lot of freedom in that. This feels the same way. So, on a week like this one, when it’s somehow already Thursday afternoon, and I have eight million other things to do in my few hours to myself, here I am, drinking a $7 turmeric latte (seriously, how do these people sleep at night?!) listening to dance beats, and giving this my best for the next 29 minutes, until this shop closes.
I am thinking like a writer. I find myself crafting pieces in my head, thinking oh this would be a good thing to write about as I go about my day, or especially when I find myself wrestling with something that feels so specific to me, but is more likely something that many people struggle with. Stories and ideas are floating to mind and asking for my attention, asking me to explore them on the page.
I am still struggling with being vulnerable. Writing the first installment in my as yet to be fully realized Taylor Swift series, brought me back to a period of my life that was not particularly happy, a relationship and its aftermath that was woven through even that happy-ish time that I wrote about. I’ve been struggling to write the follow up piece because in talking about falling in love with her music, I am ultimately talking about myself at that particular moment in time, and why her words resonated so deeply with me in the first place. And though I’ve written about that time privately or in writing club, some of what I felt then, and mostly how totally lost I was, feels too painful or too ugly to share. The writer in me knows that this is precisely where the gold lies, but the human being with feelings and an ego feels protective. Still.
On a related note, many of the glimmers or stories coming to mind that I feel excited to explore feel way too vulnerable to share here, and also like they’ll take way too long to actually create, meaning that I keep pushing them to the back burner even as I sit down to write each week. So, even though I’m writing and sharing each week, there are still a lot of pieces that I’m continuing to NOT write.
The pieces or the lines within a piece that I most worry about either being “too much”, or offending someone somehow, almost always go unnoticed. As usual, I am the only one actually trying to censor my work.
I can never predict which pieces will resonate with which people. It’s almost never the ones I expect.
It’s always such a treat when I hear from someone saying that a particular thing I wrote resonated with them. These little notes continue to make my day.
…and yet, the success truly is in hitting publish. Week after week, that’s the one part of this thing that I’m in control of, and it feels really good to get to the place where that is what I am celebrating.