Today I am hardly doing anything right.
I left the library a few minutes later than I wanted to, the drive home is at least 15 minutes, plus I stopped to get gas (that was a good idea). I walked Rose when I got home. I took us further than usual, all the way to the Seagram buildings because I had a hankering to walk through the swooping park with the grassy hillocks. It is very windy and quite sunny and the wind felt terrific on my face and in my hair. I changed into exercise clothes so I’m ready for my weights class at 5:30. I threw in a load of laundry as soon as we got home, and I toasted a bagel and then spilled pepper everywhere when I tried to grind pepper on a sliced tomato, so I had to pull out the vacuum and clean that up (or it felt like I had to).
By then it was well after 2PM,
I’ve been pretty faithful about starting the writing at 2:30, even when I’ve taken a little nap, like yesterday (so tired, up almost an hour earlier than usual, and that just did me in, but I came directly home, and napped immediately, waking at 2:30). Anyway, it is now 2:48 and I am not writing fiction. I might still need a nap, I’m not sure. I wanted to hang the laundry in the breeze because it will dry quickly, but will I have time?
I had my first class into the library this afternoon. It was nice to be reminded of why I do this job. There’s nothing quite like it. It’s a little kindergarten class, and they definitely have some impulsive talkers in the group, but on the whole, it was a really great story time and one of the children returned a book she’d lost during the last school year, and she brought me a card she’d made, with hearts and butterflies and two stick figure people—that’s me and that’s you, she said. I hung it on the wall over my book repair area.
I’m not sure how I feel about the job generally this year. I don’t feel as confident. I feel like I lost my sense of competence over the summer, like it’s weirdly and thoroughly disappeared, and I’ve been avoiding people, especially in groups. I just want to do my tasks at the library and hide away to write fiction and go to the gym and make supper for my family. Nothing extra.
I have loved the fiction writing I’ve been doing, it’s surprised me and delighted me, even when I didn’t think I was in the mood to write, I’ve just kept at it and continued, and the words seem to arrive. Yesterday I let my mind wander as I drifted off to sleep (for my 14-minute nap) and the images that arrived became the starting place for a new scene.
Today, I’m distracted and very very tired. I hate this predictive text — in very faint letters, if I’m not typing at max speed or if the word is long, some AI program embedded in this app will add in the letters that it believes should finish my word or thought. And mostly it’s wrong! Even when it’s right, I perversely (personally, it just wrote!!!) want to write something different, original. I need to turn this feature off. It is not serving me or my imagination. All this effort—delightful effort—to become a confident skilled writer and there’s something offensive about being “predicted”. Predicable.
Don’t become predictable, a mentor told me, when I was 18 or so. I heard it as a terrible warning, a rebuke—You are in danger of becoming boring, Carrie. You will lose your edge, your creativity. But I’m not sure that’s still applicable. Was I writing to prove myself interesting? Probably, when I was 18, that was true to some degree; now my youngest child is nearly 18, and proving myself interesting seems the least of my concerns. I wonder how many writers (and other artists) do their work for therapeutic reasons they may not acknowledge or recognize? I think that is most likely why I took to writing, and why I continue to write. I feel better when I write, much of the time. I also feel better sitting down to write something like this, nothing special, just pouring out what’s on my mind, a mental tidying, maybe.
And I don’t want AI attempting to do the tidying for me. Didn’t ask for it, gotta figure out how to opt out. Predictive text spells a life of tedium, where every thought is finished for me. No thank you.
I wonder why I started this by writing “Today I am hardly doing anything right”?
I can see, having written this down, that’s not accurate. Today, I did not meet every single one of the goals that I set for myself. That is accurate. I’m so tired, my eyes are closing. I will have to nap. I will nap too long, and be fuzzy-headed and unable to write very much upon waking, and I won’t like what I wrote yesterday, even though it thrilled me in the moment, and I’ll remind myself that first drafts are ugly and unwieldy, and rolling with the ideas that come is important to the process. I’ll go to the gym and lift heavy weights and my endorphins will take over and I’ll feel good again, and I’ll go out for dinner with my youngest child, just the two of us, and we’ll end up talking about big subjects and watching tennis and baseball on the big screens, and I’ll know that today, I showed up, again and again, even when it felt hard, or I felt uncertain, or anxious, or like I was hardly doing anything right.
Today I am showing up, consistently (which is sort of like being predictable, isn’t it?).
xo, Carrie
PS I turned off the predictive text. It was the doing of my web browser, and I had to figure out how to turn off “inline predictive text.” Now I can write without feeling like my screen is shouting answers at me. (And telling me that my gut instinct is wrong? That’s how I keep interpreting it … and I definitely don’t need any reinforcement of that self-defeating little voice in my head.)