I've never had a job that I liked to do.
I've had jobs that I hated, working as a mall cop for two years were some of the absolute shittiest working years of my life. I actively dreaded going to work every night, literally anything seemed preferable to putting on that smelly white button-up shirt (the buttons were fake, it was actually a zipper up the middle. I cannot think of a more succinct way of explaining everything there is to being a mall cop than that; the zipper under fake buttons) and spending eight to sixteen hours in the mall.
I've had jobs that I didn't mind. Being a valet was pretty good, I was young and healthy and made a lot of money. Working as a line cook in a tennis club was all right, I got to eat a lot of bacon and hamburgers, sure I wound up gaining about thirty pounds and made barely any money, but it wasn't loathsome.
But none of those jobs did I really like, I certainly didn't love any of them. Because none of them had anything at all to do with what I love to do.
Which is write.
It strikes me as paradoxical, then, that I have such a hard time doing it. Writing I mean. When I'm doing it, when it's working, when the ideas are coming hot and fast and I'm watching the story happen without even trying it is the best feeling in the world, it's like being high, like everything in the world is swirling around me into some sort of raw material I can drink in with my eyes and ears and mouth and nose and take it into myself and shape it and change it and set it free from the tips of my fingers.
When I'm writing like that my fingers go numb because they're hitting the keyboard so fast that the blood gets driven out of them, I'll write whole pages without even looking up at the screen unless I feel that I typed something wrong.
But I find it hard, maybe harder than it has been in the past, to get to that point. Some of it is work, I imagine, my job is a physically demanding one, and not a very mentally stimulating one. When I finish after long days I often feel like I should just drink a beer, watch television, and sleep. I usually don't do those things, but I don't write either.
It isn't all work, though, because I spend time away from work and still don't write. I took most of this week off of work to spend time with my girlfriend for her birthday and I didn't write a goddamn thing. I thought about it a lot, I wanted to, but I didn't.
I think there's a few reasons for my not writing. First of all, it's scary. I think I've said before here about how, when the idea is in your head, it is perfect, everything works out exactly how you want it, the moments you see so clearly in your head and the character's voices and faces and everything else--they're all crystal clear and you know it's the best idea you've ever had and it'll be absolutely fantastic.
Then you write it down and things are lost in the translation. To reuse a metaphor, you see the story in the wood of your imagination, and when you whittle the shape free with the blade of your pencil or pen or word processor, you make mistakes, miss things, or maybe cut a bit too much away.
The thing you wind up with might still be good, it might still be great, but it isn't what you saw, not exactly. Even the best things I've written aren't exactly what I saw in my mind. Maybe that's even a good thing, but the fear of getting it wrong makes me wary of even trying it.
Then there's the difficulty of showing off.
I realize it's vanity to want people to see and appreciate my writing, I know I should just be writing for myself, and I do, but I'm human, and like any human I like attention. I like to be told what I create is good, or interesting, or thought provoking. The difficulty with writing is that it isn't something someone can glance at and appreciate. I can't slap a page from a story on Facebook, tag some people in it, and then get likes or comments or whatever.
Sometimes I wish I was an artist or a photographer or a musician or something.
I'm not saying that those people's creations are somehow lesser than things that are written--just easier to take in--something longer than a line or two requires a bit of an investment, not much of one, but in today's world of 140 character limits and "Reading Less to Know More", it's an investment most people don't want to make.
C'est la vie. So what, who cares? I endeavor not to. Really, I do.
So the final, and biggest, thing that stops me from writing is this sensation I get in my chest, a real physical feeling right in the middle of my sternum that trails down into my guts. It's a weight that grows with each day that I don't write something, like an imaginary blockage in my chest. A tension, a growing ball of anxiety and self-defeating rhetoric. I tell myself terrible things, about how bad my writing is, how I can't even type properly, bad spelling, worse grammar, and far, far, far too many commas.
When I write, that blockage persists for a while, slowing my thoughts and making my fingers into dumb, clumsy logs that slap at the keyboard like a metaphor for something that slaps clumsily. The block lifts, though, after thirty minutes to and hour, and I remember that I like writing, that I love it, that I am passionate about it. I'd talk all day every day about writing if I could. I don't because I like having friend and don't want to annoy them out of the door, but I really would if I could.
It's the block that makes me not write, because it makes me forget that I love writing, makes me hate it, makes me fear it and loathe it as something that is burdensome and anxiety-inducting, instead of what it is.
Beautiful...and liberating.
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