I’m staring at the flashing cursor and a blank screen. For all of my talk about this process by which writing elicits more writing and practice allows words to flow more easily, I still have days where that is not the case.
I’ve been trying to write something about wonder and novelty. I’m also trying to write something, maybe related to novelty, about how when we’re engaged in the world, we begin to connect ideas and experiences in different ways. Quite often, I’ll be in a conversation with someone and I’ll be inclined to say, that reminds me of an essay I was reading or a podcast I just listened to. When that happens, I feel mentally alive – or like the world is in sync or that connections are everywhere. I opened up both of those documents and was bored with them before the end of the first paragraph.
Sitting here, not writing, feels like a bad date with myself. The meal is done, and there’s nothing to talk about. The silence is awkward. “so… ummm, yeah…” And because it’s 5 am, I can’t even make the date interesting with alcohol. And because it’s 5 am, my date isn’t very pretty (hair is a mess, glasses are slovenly perched half-way down nose, yesterday’s t-shirt is covered in dog hair).
This is not wonder.
Essay camp has flopped. It can be rescued, but it’ll take some time and work. I haven’t done the prompts for the past two days. Here, on day five (as of the this very moment 7:15 am), there is no prompt yet. I sort of did a prompt on day 3. I did a free write about how ideas connect, but for the most part, I don’t feel as though I’ve stuck with it the way I should have.
This failure is about routine and timing. I’m a morning writer. I’m also better at exercising in the morning (which is why I struggle to do both). At the end of the day… well, I’m not sure what to say about the end of the day. At the end of the day, the dog needs attention, and I want to eat and unwind, maybe have a drink with a friend, or scroll social media, or look for jobs. I have trouble creating space for writing at the end of the day. I know when I try to do my daily fifty-two words in the evening, it’s much harder than when I attempt it in the morning. Perhaps a more practiced writer would be able to write at all times and under all conditions. I am not a more practiced writer. I need the crutch of my routines, the comfort of my habits.
Unfortunately, the prompts from essay camp have been arriving later in the morning than they did on the first two days. On those days when I head into the office, I have a pretty structured timeline. Feed the dog by 6:30, shower, walk the dog around 7, make lunch and get other things together, leave the house between 7:45 and 8:00. My writing time is from whenever I get up and eat breakfast until 6:30. The prompts on the two days I didn’t do them arrived pretty close to 6:30. That timing doesn’t given me sufficient time to work on them before going to work.
The first day that this timing issue happened, I kinda waited around for the email prompt. I read the news, I read some old blog posts, I mentally puttered. I didn’t want to get into any new writing and then have to switch gears. I wanted to be able to focus on whatever the assignment would be. When this happened a second day, I realized that maybe I should have adjusted my schedule so that each morning I was working on the prompt from the day before. I only thought of that a little before I had to get ready for work.
The question I’m asking myself here, in this space, is why does knowing the timing of the prompt ahead of time feel helpful or important. I think for me, this comes down to managing expectations… If the prompts arrive consistently at 3 am, I know I’ll be able to work on them in the morning. If they’re going to arrive at 10 am, they’ll likely have to wait for the next day. Yet today, knowing the prompt might still arrive late, I didn’t shift my behavior. I still sat around and waited – and then began this post (a little in resentment).
The practice of waiting can be a trigger for me. I spent significant parts of my childhood waiting by the window for my father to pick us up (for basketball, baseball, or whatever we were doing). Later in life, I had relationships where I found myself waiting – either for reconciliations and reunions or big decisions, only to find the person had moved on or gone in a different direction. Waiting is sometimes fraught with anxiety.
As a coping strategy, I’ve adopted tactics that often put what I’m waiting for above some of my own interests. This can make me seem overly accommodating. I am the type of person who will forgo doing things in order to include other people. As a believer in giving time to the things and people I value, I am all too happy to make time and space – sometimes as a personal sacrifice. What I don’t do well is communicate these behaviors/expectations. Then, when the other people don’t show up or they change the plans, I sometimes resent it. Sometimes, I take it as a personal affront – as though they don’t value my time. Of course, if I don’t communicate that I’m putting off other plans or don’t communicate my expectations, they can’t know that I’m waiting around. This has been an issue in some of my personal relationships. Knowing this, I try to instruct and model communication techniques that can help manage my expectations. This is entirely a “me” thing.
I recently came across a statement from a therapist account I follow that touched on this type of communication. She said, “Giving an anxiously attached partner reassurance sounds like: ‘Things will be busy at work today and I won’t be able to text for a bit. I just want you to know I love you and I’ll be thinking about you.'” I have, at times, been that anxiously attached partner. While I don’t quite need it to go that far, I appreciate anticipatory communication. For me, it’s less about the reassurance that they love me and more about the reassurance that the silence isn’t an indication of a problem. While growing up, silence and withholding was sometimes used as a punishment. Therefore, I’m often on the lookout for things that might be amiss. If we’re in the habit of texting throughout the day, and it is a busy work day, getting that type of a heads-up text allows me to adjust my thinking (and expectations) to “cool, everything is fine and I’ll go about my day without expecting to hear much from you.”
In a society filled with noise and anxiety, I think we’ve been trained to distrust silence. How many times have we heard the phrase “giving someone the silent treatment”? As survival techniques, it’s advantageous to recognize behavioral patterns and breaks in those patterns. Keen observation serves as an early warning system. There’s some common management wisdom that states, “the biggest concern for any organization should be when their most passionate people become quiet.” The same can be said of relationships.
As children, we learn this very early on. We look to our parents to provide a sense of safety and consistency. We monitor them for changing conditions – sometimes looking for the quiet before the storm. Observations on how that parental consistency of care and attention plays out in our earliest years has become the basis for attachment theory. Common coping mechanisms for inconsistent attention manifests as avoidant behaviors (you’re unreliable, so I’m going to go my own way and only rely on myself) or anxious behaviors (you’re unreliable, but I’m going to wait here and demand your attention until you give it to me). Those two people always seem to find each other. While I’m capable of both behaviors (most of us are), I’m much more inclined to wait for reassurance than I am to push people away and go it alone.
Essay camp (to bring it full circle) is a different situation with considerably lower stakes. The camp is set up as email blasts. There’s no (or little) interaction between the participants and the instructor. At an in-person writer’s retreat, I have to imagine there’s a structure to each day. Breakfast is at a certain time. Gatherings or lessons or readings are at certain times. Because this is virtual camp that spans multiple time zones, it has to be asynchronous. For me, it would have been helpful to know that a new prompt would be delivered by a certain time in the day each day so that I might schedule my attendance accordingly. What I find interesting is that even when I know to expect late delivery or inconsistent timing, I still wait around hoping it will become more structured, slightly resenting that it isn’t. In a weird way, it’s almost as if I’m expecting to be disappointed because the prompt won’t arrive in time for me to work on it, but I’m helpless to do much more than sit around waiting to be proven right.
I’m not even sure what to do with these parallels other than to observe them with curiosity and try to be less petulant. I think the bigger irony is that in the first day or two of camp, we were reminded of how important routine is… yet the delivery of content has made following along in real-time and establishing a routine difficult. A write-along workshop (which is how this is defined) feels like it would have a different pace than a self-paced course might… and I suspect I’d have had more success had I treated it as a self-paced exercise in which the material is all posted ahead of time and I access it when I can. I suppose that’s what I may do now that I’ve allowed a few days of material to pile up.