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Free Writing Tomorrow!

This writing is my work. I have to remind myself of that. It’s not like a job where you clock in, fulfill some expectations, clock out, and get paid. My writing is for me. It’s my heart work. It’s my art work. It’s my own battle that I’m fighting for myself.

The battle isn’t in the writing, it’s in what happens before I write. It’s the fight against resistance that happens to all creative people. Everything in my world is pushing back against my desire to do my work and I will rationalize anything to make myself believe that I don’t really need to write, I don’t really want to write, at least not right now. Later. Tomorrow.

There’s a little hole in the wall bar down the street from where I live with a sign out front that says “FREE BEER – TOMORROW!”. It’s always tomorrow when the free beer will be available, but the problem is, it is never tomorrow, it is always today.

That’s what I do to myself with my heart work also. I say, copious amounts of writing tomorrow! Because “free beer today” is too costly. And no mistake, sitting down to write costs me something. It costs me the pain of introspection, the reality check of putting words down that may or may not please me later, the frightening prospect of putting truth out there.

But over the long run it still costs me more not to do my work. I forfeit peace, purpose, groundedness, satisfaction, and accomplishment.

A quandary is this: There are things I need to express, work out, and put into words that could veer into the territory of “not my story to tell”. This has been a large part of my difficulty lately. I don’t want to expose someone else’s secrets or violate their privacy. I could write everything in a private journal but for me that doesn’t satisfy the cosmic requirement of putting it out there. Even if no one stumbles onto this blog, I am still putting my words out into the ether to be shared with the universe and that, for me, is part of the process.

So that’s difficult. I do think I am entitled to share my story even when it overlaps with someone else’s. I just have to be careful to tell it from my perspective and not try to state what was going on in someone else’s head and heart because I can’t know that and *that* is definitely not my story to tell.

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My War of Art

Yeah, it’s been a long time since I posted anything. I read my “non-negotiables” here and laughed aloud. I’ve allowed life to knock me down too many times. I’ll tell you something, I’m tough when it comes to physical pain. Through the process of natural childbirth I learned how to pinpoint any area in my body that feels painful and just wash the pain away with deep breathing and relaxation. But when it comes to emotional pain, I am way too fragile. I kneejerk my way through any kind of situation that triggers my old wounds in this area.

And that means I have been neglecting my work, which in this case is my writing work. The work is for me, not anyone else, which of course means I don’t get any financial reward. But I do get to be sane for another day, and that’s a big thing. My emotional pain has been talking me out of writing for a while now, so it has become this cyclical thing – the less I write the worse I begin to feel and the worse I feel the more I allow this emotional pain to keep me from delving into the difficulties of being vulnerable on the page. Or if I do write, I then hide it from the world because either I think it sucks or it is wonderful but too raw, too honest, too personal.

But I am re-reading The War of Art and taking Steven Pressfield’s words to heart. I have to stop allowing Resistance to win this war. I have to sit down and do the work of writing even when it feels so painful to even try, when it seems like doing the laundry is ever so urgent, or taking a nap, or checking Facebook. I have to do it even though the words are halting, awkward, and just plain shitty. I have to be willing to sit down and write crap, every day, until the muse shows up to reward me for my diligence.

I’ve proven to myself before that this happens (after the first time I read The War of Art) – the angels come and give me my prize when I make it my first priority to write each day. Eventually the stars align and I look back on what I’ve written and I think it’s pretty good stuff. I feel so much more purposeful, settled, aligned, and content when I am writing every day. It is my Work. Whether it is crap or pretty good, whether anyone ever sees it or not, it’s something I have to do for myself.