Journals and diaries don’t have to be sacred. There doesn’t need to be a ritual or a format. I’m telling this to myself to remove some of the pressure. The fact that I got out a pen and started writing at all feels like a victory. That I am now typing this out into a blog post is another one.
I’m writing with no motive and it feels fun. Inviting, easy, like hey it’s okay, write what you want.
I wake up and instead of going right back to whatever TV show I was binging the night before, I get out of bed and make coffee, turn on the radio, and finally pick up and start reading a book I bought four months ago that I’ve looked at every day since it came in the mail and thought maybe today is the day I’ll read this and then didn’t. It felt good and productive to read a book, even if reading is just another passive act of consumption similar to watching television, but it still felt like I was doing something. I read the book throughout the day and finished it. I even took notes.
These things aren’t hard to do, so I’m frustrated with how long it takes me to quit procrastinating. I keep calling myself lazy but I think my reluctance to begin tasks, even if they are activities that I enjoy, is my depression talking. It’s so much easier to lay back in bed and watch Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares than it is to sit up and open a text document to write in or edit, even if I’m guilt tripping myself because I know I’m wasting time.
I’m writing a novel. I haven’t really worked on it since August, but I always think about it. I always think about the story and the scenes and how I want to shape and finish them. There’s a lot that I want to do with the novel and I’m scared that I won’t be able to execute. I psyche myself out of opening the document. I don’t want to fail, so I just keep thinking about it, as if the more I play the novel out in my head the better equipped I’ll be when I get back to writing it. I tell myself that I need hours and hours of time to get into my groove and feel like I’m in the novel, and I need a bumper day in between working my day job and working on the novel to decompress and prepare myself mentally, but I’m probably making excuses for myself.
If I can write a blog post I can work on the novel. I just have to keep reminding myself of that.