Hard-wired for writing
Babies can sleep through anything. (Image by ATDS)
Whatever hard times I may go through in life, I will never forget the spring of 2020.
Not only did I face massive upheaval in my professional life and social life just like everyone else, I was one of those who migrated.
When I got the questionnaire for the 2020 Census, I didn’t know what to put. My permanent residence was in Atlanta, but we were renting an apartment in Maine. But we weren’t there — we were staying with my parents two hours away.
We had thought we were going for a few days, but we ended up staying for ten weeks.
I don’t remember crying much during that stretch of time. I felt sort of numb. I remember working at my parents’ dining room table hour after hour every day — there was so much work — and watching Schitt’s Creek every night.
And every weekday morning, without fail, I wrote and published a piece here on my blog.
It’s strange, in retrospect, to think of that. In such a chaotic time, it would have been understandable if my writing practice were to fall by the wayside along with just about every other aspect of the routine I had become accustomed to.
Instead, the writing became the one consistent thing that I hung onto. Wake up, write.
I still had stuff to say, and I said it. And some of it is relevant only to the circumstances of that spring. But some of it still resonates.
I’ve been going through a hard time again — a totally different kind of hard time than the spring 2020 lockdown. I’m doing okay — I have fantastic support and I’m taking good care of myself. But I’ve let go of a lot of things in order to do that.
When I mentioned to my colleague Tracy that I’m somehow still finding the time to write, she smiled and said, “It’s probably hard-wired by this point.” Just like I get dressed, eat lunch, or know the chords to “Starman” without thinking about it, I write.
I’m not sure exactly how it happened. Judging by my experience back in 2020, I guess this habit was hard-wired after only a year.
I don’t know what my life would be like without writing, because I haven’t stopped to find out.
That makes me think of other habits that I could intentionally “hard wire” in order to gain the benefit of them. It’s been interesting to see how quickly I fell out of the habit of posting on TikTok and how hard it is to get back on the horse again in my current circumstances. I miss it, but it’s not part of my routine in the same way that writing is. In fact, I never established a routine, and that’s probably the reason that, for all my effort, it isn’t a habit that I can continue without thinking about it.
Of course, showing up on video is very different from writing. I can write without good lighting and makeup. I can write without knowing ahead of time what I’m going to write about. I can write and come back to it later. I can write at the coffee shop, the library, or in a quiet house without disturbing anybody.
But there are all kinds of reasons not to write, too. I’ve just managed to overcome them. Tracy also pointed out that, in her own creative practice, she’s learned how to ignore or override the many reasons not to do it. When it comes to video, background noise like a neighbor running a lawnmower can make it easy to give up. She recognizes this and chooses to make the video anyway. That’s not yet the case with me and video, but it’s definitely the case with me and writing.
I’m not sure how many more things I can adopt as baseline habits that I’m able to stick with no matter what is going on in my life. But it’s been surprising and comforting to note that writing has become such a solid part of who I am. Even with so much in life that I can’t control, at least there are things I can influence. That gives me hope.
