A Fitting Time to Start?
This blog is not a new year's resolution. Firstly because I told myself I'd open one for a while now1, and secondly because I'm scared to do those. Declaring some self-betterment goal on the 1st of January feels more like jinxing yourself than anything else, sticking to that goal past February is a project so doomed it's become a joke. And yet, here I am starting something new on Jan. 2nd. Will I stick to it, or will this little corner gather dust like the roller-skates I bought an embarrassingly long time ago?
Maybe we'll find an answer if we look at why I'm doing this in the first place - I need to write more. Or, do I want to write more? When I think about it, need and want is what my motivation problem boils down to. I have a pretty hard time with hobbies, with bringing myself to do activities I don't feel obligated to do. I can name many roller-skate or musical instrument shaped examples, but the most glaring one is this: I don't read apart from my required reading for university, despite the fact that there's so many things I want to read (or at the very least, want to have read). In fewer words... everything feels like too much of a chore, except for my actual chores!
This has to do with a lack of time and energy, it has to do with my addiction to social media, but I think an equally important reason is that actively bringing your(my)self to do something involves a decent amount of dread. This is where we come back to writing. I recently read Malcolm Cowley's "How Writers Write"2 (as you can guess, for a course) and got to a passage that slapped me right in the face:
The professional writers who dread writing, as many do, are usually those whose critical sense is not only strong but unsleeping, so that it won't allow them to do even a first draft at top speed. They are in most cases the "bleeders" who write one sentence at a time, and can't write it until the sentence before has been revised. William Styron, one of the bleeders, is asked if he enjoys writing. "I certainly don't," he says. "I get a fine warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it, writing is hell." But a moment later he says without any sense of contradiction, "I find that I'm simply the happiest, the placidest, when I'm writing... it's the only time that I feel completely self-possessed, even when the writing itself is not going too well."
I very much feel the same way - getting started is more often than not a huge pain, both when starting something entirely new and when it's just another day of doing the thing I'm supposedly best at. But, Styron is happiest when writing, and I'm having fun right now. This alone should be enough reason to try to keep this blogging thing up, but I'm also trying to write regularly because if I keep only writing when (and about what) I'm told to, I'm never going to get a really good voice. So I guess it's not a need as in "I need to do this or I fail this class", but it's still very much a need and not purely a want. Same goes for most of the reading I want to do. Perhaps this is the difference for me between a hobby and a passion. For now, the roller-skates seem like a hill too steep for me. I'll stick to caring for my plants, which are great because they (normally) only require five minutes of my attention a day to thrive.
So this blog is not a new year's resolution, but I'm gonna subscribe to the belief that the most fitting time to start something new is right now.
Ever since one Optimistic Lucio has, in his words, infected me with his brain fungus. I owe you, don't I?↩
An introduction to the book "Writers at Work" (1958), edited by Cowley, which is a compilation of author interviews from the magazine "The Paris Review."↩