September 2025
Not every day needs to be productive to be worth something.
– Sabyasachi Roy “Writing While the World Burns” (AuthorsPublish)
This sentence summarizes what I’ve been feeling, what I’ve been craving and it came at the exact right time this week – thank you Sabyasachi Roy and AuthorsPublish.
I cannot seem to go slow enough or reel in any productivity. Though I want to.
I make plans. I have spreadsheets of what I want to write. Then when I go to that topic, I have NO interest. No desire, no longing – that time has passed. (Or I think “Do we really need more of the same words out there saying the same thing? I will always err on the side of less. Always.)
I’m all for showing up and getting the job done. Sometimes I wonder if there is actually no job to do. I’m just making myself do these things to prove that I’m worthwhile, that I exist, that I do have a voice (whether or not anyone reads it). Or am I really doing this just because I want to share and see what happens…
Usually the latter and sometimes the former because I am human.
When I mention how unscheduled, unhurried, uncommitted and not crazy I am with my schedule (I’m crazy about other things though, don’t worry) – I already get looks and they aren’t good. How unproductive am I really willing to go?
I’m looking forward to the shorter days and longer nights now that the temperature has gone down a little bit.
This is the time of year when being an introvert is more acceptable – less pushback to manage.
It is also my most fertile time of year for words, ideas, thoughts and worlds. And they drift by when I’m not in a mode or mood to capture them.
I have found that there’s something about writing things down and making things real that just doesn’t feel right.
I almost just want to live, not write about it, not capture it and just BE in it.
I find that most things are better in the anticipation, the wonder.
The minute I write things down or try to flesh an idea out – the magic and dreaminess has gone out of it and I can’t get it back.
That’s been the case with most of my life as well. Many of the things I have dreamt of, desired, longed for over the years – were so much better in my mind…than how they actually ended up. Reality is a bummer.
I’m realizing that (which is a summary of my creative life):
I’d rather the ephemeral for a moment than the documentation to remember a minute detail way less than the whole.
I’d rather the dream than to bring something to life without it having the magic.
I want to turn away and sink in even more than I already have. This is the time of year when I want to delete everything I have ever put on the internet (if there is such a way anymore!) I decide that writing, that sharing myself, that putting myself out there is just crazy talk and I need to stop it. If I don’t capture and share, did it happen? Yet it’s hard not to want to capture and share. That’s the whole human interaction thing that I crave in a way that doesn’t require me to be out past dinner time or with a whole bunch of people at one time.
After years of stopping/deleting and starting and deleting and starting again, I have kept myself from deleting (for the last 3 years at least.) It is the fear that I am locked into something I said or believed a few years ago (which by now I know is nonsense) and that I’m going to be judged and defined by it. It is enough to make anyone take a pause before writing and sharing (I would hope at least.)
However, the desire to just exist, without a body of work, or proof of existence…
It’s always the siren song that makes me pull everything down I can for a year or two. Until I decide to get back out there and share again…
To counteract it, I try to look back and look at what I’ve done as a harvest. Figuring out where I’m not thrilled, seeing where I have grown, what I have built and what I want to come with me as I keep going.
And more particularly what I want to let go of – so it doesn’t follow me (as strongly) into the next chapter of life. There are things that have been around for decades that I always think I’m walking away from, yet it always comes back around in a different way. On good days, I realize there is more to release. On bad days, I feel like a failure and wonder why I hang onto things that clearly are not good for me.
So this pull of silence, solitude, slowing down, disappearing, of existing without any “proof”…yet the desire to share that desire and be less alone in that desire with others…
Working on letting all the contradictions co-exist…it wouldn’t be the first or last time contradictions existed together.
