I Love Writing; I Hate Having Written - 12/12
Dorothy Parker’s “I hate writing; I love having written” is a quote that will always be in my rotation. Like Parker, I tend to find as much pain in the writing process as I do joy in the outcome. Writing gives me grit, purpose, and connection with self the way few things do.
Lately, as I’ve been picking up the pen and enjoying writing’s not-so-maddening side, I’ve remembered how it’s also possible to love writing, but hate having written – how stepping away from prose is only the beginning.
Having written means welcoming back the chatter. And welcoming back the chatter means retreating into my own internal writers’ room. A brain always working overtime, in search of stories and perspectives and personalities that I’ll have to spew out and make sense of and refine the next time I attempt to write again.
The writing process is like a 1,000 piece puzzle freshly poured out of the box. 1,000 little pieces that must be spread out and examined and ultimately come together to create a full picture of what we’ve been looking at all along. And damn it, stepping back for the grand reveal truly is something to love.
What I feel with writing, the notion of hating-then-loving or loving-then-hating-but-ultimately-wholeheartedly-loving has gotten me thinking about the blessings and burdens of one’s purpose or calling.
A calling implies that there’s something on the other side of us – name it God or gut – that we’re listening to. And the more we start hearing that calling; be it creative, entrepreneurial, spiritual, etc.; the harder it becomes to ignore. It’s simply embedded in our DNA.
My question for those reading this who have felt even an inkling of this internal pull is: how do you choose to walk towards your calling? Will you be obedient or obsessive? What will it look like to fulfill the calling, and will you compromise other areas of your life in service of it? And at the end of the day, will you love it? Will you hate it? Or are you simply content in knowing you picked up the call?
Find Your Rhythm, Follow Your Riches, Become Poet Enough - 9/22
After four days of trudging from couch to bed to bath to couch to bed and back to couch again, I was finally able to spread these COVID-positive wings and walk beyond my front door. Though I’m not quite past the finish line, I was well enough to work a full day (from home, of course) and delight in a masked afternoon walk to Rite Aid. Being sick has its downside, but the perk of barely being able to function for a few days is the joy of the first day back at it. Back to making my morning smoothie and eggs, back at my standing desk, back in work meetings, back on Sunset Blvd to greet this beautiful, disturbing city while the sun’s still out, and right back to my bed to reflect on it all.
—
In one of my favorite books, Letters to a Young Poet, writer Rainer Maria Rilke writes, “If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.”
I often think of the challenge this quote implies, of creating a spark from life’s mundane moments. Moments that we’ve lived before, streets we’ve walked down countless times that couldn’t possibly have something new to offer us. Or even days like today, a not-as-sick-as-the-day-before kind of day that introduces something new into the pattern.
For me, writing is a wonderful practice that gets my gears going. It can give a 20-minute pharmacy run a sense of personality, of rhythm. And I can imbue that rhythm into a character I draw or a stroke of my paintbrush. But…I have to continue pulling out my pen to generate that feeling consistently, to keep digging deeper.
Creating is a practice. It takes force to disrupt our usual ways of thinking, and we can’t rely on the highs and lows of life to dictate inspiration. So, my challenge to myself, as well as anyone else with whom this post resonates, is to call forth the riches of your own life. Get lost, play, be imperfect, and don’t get too caught up in the “getting there” of it all.