21

Of course, after exclaiming over how easy I found last week and how well I was settling into new habits and routines, I plodded like a tortoise through this week. Of course! I was reminded of how hard Week 3 of habit formation is; you're past the initial high, then you don't wake up for an alarm or two, throwing things off schedule, and then you start to wonder if this is what you really wanted, all this angst over getting up and writing and getting home and reading. 

Yes, I've had to remind myself this week: yes, this is what you want. It doesn't matter that the word count on my short story has barely risen, or that I've fallen behind on tracking my reading (again); it matters that I've shown up. Each day, for twenty-one days in a row, I've shown up to these good things that I want to be a part of my life. I committed to something, and then I kept my word, continuing on my journey of becoming an undivided person. 

What have I learned over the past three weeks? Writing is hard; not writing is harder. If I think it's challenging or not worth making the effort to write, I need only consider what it felt like to have a small voice inside me that insisted I had something to say, and to ignore that voice completely. That's an unbearable burden; I'll take the burden of trying to muster up the courage and discipline to write any day. 

Madeleine L'Engle's words met me at just the right time this morning:

"Of course. It's all been said better before. If I thought I had to say it better than anybody else, I'd never start. Better or worse is immaterial. The thing is that it has to be said; by me; ontologically. We each have to say it, to say it in our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes out through us. Good or bad, great or little: that isn't what human creation is about. It is that we have to try; to put it down in pigment, or words, or musical notations, or we die. 

Madeleine has put it better than me, and I am okay with that. It just matters that I have put down something, in my own voice, in my own way. 

Reading was the other half of the equation over these past three weeks. It has required as much discipline and a few trickier conversations than the writing. Mornings are largely uninterrupted in my house. I am (usually) up the earliest, and don't get in anyone's way by going through my morning routine. In the afternoons and evenings, I return to a shared space, to S, whom I love. It's been hard for me to say that I need that space to myself, those twenty minutes, and that I really will be much better for her and everybody else after them. She has been gracious and understanding, of course, but being clear on what I need has been a challenge for me. Guarding this pocket of time has led to the finishing of many books (yay), but it has also allowed me to be more fully myself, as I always am when I am reading. 

That's a good way of summarising the past twenty-one days, really: a return to writing and reading, and, more essentially, a return to myself.