I’ve been scratching around for something to post this week and getting nowhere. This is a miserable state for a writer to be in. I’ve been jumping from one possible subject to another like some philandering wordsmith romancing whatever topic comes my way.
Yesterday, in an email to a friend, I wrote: “I have felt a lot of shoulds. I should write more, I should write better, I should read more, I should read better, I should exercise more, I should clean my house and tend to the garden more, I should reach out to more friends, …O.K. let me stop. I’m sure you get the idea.”
You know what she wrote back?
“Don’t should all over yourself.”
That was so perfect.
I’ve been chasing something that can’t be chased. The words arrive when they want to, not when I need an ego fix. All week I had been “shoulding” on myself starting with the thought that I should go to school and learn how to be a real writer. I looked up the requirements for a Creative Writing MA at Sonoma State and found them completely daunting. One of the requirements was that I be conversant in a foreign language. So that’s not gonna happen. I’d love to speak Spanish, but I’m not going to pay college tuition to do it. And then there are the grades; my GPA days are over. Going back to school and navigating academic waters just isn’t how I want to spend my time. I’d like to have big, fancy credentials, at least my ego would, but I’d much rather go mountain biking with my husband, read fun books, have lunch with my girlfriend, putter in my yard, oh yeah and then there’s also the hairdressing work I do and love and it puts money in my pocket.
The bottom line is something I know one day and forget the next: I AM GOOD ENOUGH. Why is that so hard to remember? Why is it so hard to believe?
The good news is that I have far more days that I feel all is well, then the days of self-doubt.
I’m gonna sign off now and go enjoy the day as it is, not as it should be.
Have a good week, and I’ll post again next Friday.