prev quitting time next
2001-11-26 | 12:17 p.m.

I am on a quitting spree. I disentangled myself from my Truant duties; wrote to Birgit this morning to tell her I'm resigning from the board of the publishing house, and I'll probably write to the editor of my restaurant reviews, too, though he can't be holding his breath. There's not much left after that. I do intend to continue volunteering in the reading lab at school, but that's it. That's the only obligation I want right now.

Why all this quitting? Hard to say. Though my life doesn't look particularly taxing from any angle, I feel burdened. Every project I take on, I end up hating. Usually I start out hating it, but I tell myself it might get better; it might be easier than I think. But it never is, because my productivity level is down to almost nothing.

I was thinking I could go to therapy, but then I thought, nah, just fix it yourself. At least try. I'm not yet beyond the reach of my own helping hand. And the first thing I want to be able to do is walk down the street without feeling as if I am failing to meet someone else's expectations. Expectations kill me. If I can find a way to be productive as a writer, under my own power and without the onus of trying to meet anyone else's expectations, I will have found my own personal grail. I will be an artist, too.

It is wrong to have as much freedom of choice as I have and not channel it into something. It doesn't have to be a novel. There could be pages, individual pages, pencil sketches, photographs. Think of the bird that builds her nest out of a piece of yarn, a scrap of paper, twigs, straw, tinsel. Yes, there are tensions in my life that I struggle with, but I don't have to succumb to them. I always come back to my need for discipline; I've been talking about it for years. To this I would add, despite the trendy smack of it, the need for mindfulness. It's not enough to sit in a chair and stare at the grain of the oak desktop.

My brain is like an old car that's been stored out in the barn too long. The thought of using it again seems a daunting one, but I must keep reminding myself: it was running when you put it in there.

prev archive next
0 comments